McLellan TraceyDr TRACEY McLELLAN (Labour—Banks Peninsula): Thank you Madam Speaker. I start my contribution to this urgent debate as many of my colleagues have already done by sincerely acknowledging the life lost—the person whose death has been the impetus of the report that we are now debating in this House this afternoon. I extend my condolences to the family and to all the loved ones involved.As several colleagues have also mentioned I think it's important in times like this when the health workforce will be the ones most acutely feeling this incident in terms of their response to acknowledge that we do have a world-class health workforce and it's incredibly incredibly—potentially—easy to lose sight of that at the moment whilst we talk about all of the stresses that the health system undoubtedly is under. It's easy to lose sight of the fact that we have an amazing world-class health workforce and as a Government it is up to us to support them and to fund them and to ensure that they're able to work the way that they do.Before entering this House I did a variety of things but the role that I performed most recently before being elected to this House was that I worked for the New Zealand Nurses Organisation (NZNO). As someone who worked for the New Zealand Nurses Organisation I had I believe a relatively broad view of what our health system looked like—certainly across the main sectors of the primary healthcare the district health board healthcare the aged-care sector and our private hospitals and hospices. I do agree somewhat with the member who's resumed his seat Matt Doocey in so far as acknowledging that we do need more people working in our health workforce and we have done for a number of years. We certainly needed more people several years ago when I was working in this sector.I also want to acknowledge that every day I was privileged to work with amazing nurses and healthcare assistants who were incredibly dedicated. And I acknowledge all of the delegates in particular who took on those extra roles to advocate on behalf of their colleagues many of whom back in 2013 '14 '15 were already tired of having to advocate for shortages in the healthcare sector. As others have acknowledged you can't magic up a nurse overnight. These people are highly trained and it takes time to address those shortages let alone the shortages with positions and various other medical people in the healthcare sector.Two things come to mind when I think back about that time at NZNO. The first one in relation to comments that were made earlier by members of the Opposition was about CCDM—the Care Capacity Demand Management system—that has been funded quite some time; conceived of by the Opposition but never funded appropriately. Personally I worked on the implementation of that in one small hospital for five years and do you think we could get to the bottom of it? No because it was never funded enough. Just as perfect policy may exist—and there are plenty of really good examples of that—they will always fail if they're not funded appropriately. I am still rueful of the opportunities that the previous Government overlooked in terms of getting this system off the ground properly and what a difference that would have made to our current workforce today.The other thing that strikes me is that I also worked on aspects of High Performance High Engagement and the thing that I will always think about our workforce is just how incredibly clever they are. There are some amazing skills out there and if we were to resource them properly and to afford them the clinical freedoms to do things differently again we can build a better health system. But what I am particularly proud of is the fact that this Government has been the one to acknowledge that things do need to be done differently. We have made record investments in building a new system. It won't happen overnight but we are absolutely moving in the right direction—a nearly 45-percent increase in funding which has equated to 5000 new registered nurses and that's just one aspect of the workforce. The independent review has undoubtedly brought up some useful recommendations and we thank all those people involved with that as well.