Stewart Barbara: Financial Review Debate — In Committee 
Stewart Barbara: Financial Review Debate — In Committee 
[Volume:646;Page:15027] 
BARBARA STEWART (NZ First) 
: 
 On behalf of New Zealand First I am very pleased to talk on the Appropriation (2006/07 Financial Review) Bill. When the committee examined the reports we saw that some good work had been done in the health system. Some good work was under way but in some areas more needed to be done. I am the very first to admit that the health sector has a huge job on its hands. 
Action is overdue on maternity services. We are in the middle of a baby boom; it is very obvious right around the country. It is totally irresponsible to ignore this boom or to hope it will go away because it will not. Services need to be right in this area; the cost is far too great if they are not. We are currently short of about 200 midwives and the likelihood that we can fill that number of vacancies is extremely remote. The Minister has to be proactive and investigate ways in which the workforce can be increased and that does not mean importing huge numbers of people from overseas like seasonal workers to gain experience in hospitals and learn on our mothers and babies. We want more than that. We need to encourage some of the midwives that have left the service to return or else to talk to New Zealand general practitioners to find out how many of them are willing to resume providing maternity services in order to alleviate this ongoing shortage of midwives. Another alternative would be to follow the recommendations of the New Zealand Medical Association that primary maternity services be contracted to primary health organisations so that general practitioners can again become involved and provide mothers with continuity of care with their general practitioners and their practice nurses. 
This also raises the whole issue of staff shortages. Right across this area staff shortages need to be addressed. In most medical fields there are huge staff shortages and the job cannot be done on a sustainable basis. We know that in the short term locums are flown around the country and even across from Australia. This type of service is expensive and although it fills an immediate short-term gap it does have a serious downside apart from the huge cost to the health system. Patients cannot be guaranteed to see the same doctor twice and that can be really upsetting for most people. New Zealanders need certainty about their health care and medical students should be encouraged to work off their student loans right here in New Zealand. The fact that many of them head off overseas for better money to pay back those loans just exacerbates the problem. It is a shame to export our First World medical people. Although additional places have been made available in medical schools—a measure that New Zealand First applauds—we need to ensure that these students stay in New Zealand if the workforce problem is ever to be sorted. 
We need to attract some of these people back to New Zealand. A number of doctors who are interested in nuclear medicine have contacted me and they say they would come back to New Zealand instantly if this branch of medicine were available here. The purchase of a publicly funded PET scanner would be an incentive for some of those doctors to return but at this point in time there is absolutely nothing here in New Zealand for them. We train them here in New Zealand but we cannot attract them back unless our equipment catches up with that of the rest of the world. A PET scanner has many medical uses for heart patients as well as for cancer patients. Our patients would have more and better treatment options if we had one of these pieces of equipment. There are staff who are interested in this field of medicine and want to return to New Zealand and quite frankly it is time we had this valuable piece of equipment. We are being left behind by most other countries because of bureaucratic dithering over cost. The matter needs to be sorted out by the Minister very very promptly. We all know that prompt access to cancer treatments and services is absolutely essential. Patients need certainty of care in this very important area. It is a serious disease and we need to act in relation to it. So in New Zealand First we are looking to see what will happen with the purchase of this equipment.