Leavasa Anae Neru; Craig Liz; Verrall AyeshaDr ANAE NERU LEAVASA (Labour—Takanini): Kia orana Madam Chair. Kia orana to the Minister the Hon Ayesha Verrall as well. I just thank the Minister for answering some of the questions especially on the Winter Preparedness Plan. It is the first of its kind—the investment into 193 additional front-line clinical staff which will be funded in Budget 2023 but also to see the investment of an extra half a billion dollars for primary and community care—obviously I will still push for our community providers there—and also to see the $5 co-payment gone which will definitely help and has helped many of my community members in South Auckland.One of the focuses I want to speak about is around our young people and how the extension of school-based health services supports the physical and mental health of our young people. Looking at Cyclone Gabrielle and the affected areas there how will the roll-out of the successful Mana Ake programme to our primary and intermediate schools in the Hawke's Bay and Tairāwhiti areas make an impact to support our tamariki in those areas? Thank you.Dr LIZ CRAIG (Labour): Thank you Madam Chair. I'd actually be interested to hear a little bit more about the funding in Budget 2023 to reduce waiting lists and also to standardise access to healthcare. There were some recent announcements around cataract surgery. Being from down South I hadn't quite realised just how many more points those residents in the Southern region needed to get cataract surgery than some of those further North. So I'd just like to hear a little bit more about what investments in Budget 2023 are being put in place to ensure that we can get equity around the country in terms of cataract surgery—also though looking then at how that approach could be used to look at other equity issues in terms of reducing the postcode lottery for other elective surgery and other interventions. I'd be really keen to hear more about that as well.Hon Dr AYESHA VERRALL (Minister of Health): Just circling back to make sure I've dealt with all of these questions on the list I can reassure Dr Reti that the Capital Investment Committee was disestablished as part of the transition to the new health system but its function is carried over to a subcommittee of the Te Whatu Ora board. It includes board members as well as external experts.In response to the question about cataracts that has been a persistent inequity in our health system and one of the ones that has really been illustrative of the inequities that existed when we had 20 district health boards. Literally in Dr Liz Craig's part of the country and in Canterbury people would have to be legally blind before they were able to qualify for publicly funded surgery for their cataracts whereas in other parts of the country surgery could be done much earlier because that was just the difference in how the DHBs chose to or had to allocate their funds. So being able to allocate some of the funds that were prioritised to wait-lists towards the initiative of getting over 3000 additional cataract operations done has meant that over time we can progressively bring that threshold back to the place where it is the same across the country because that is fair and what every citizen and taxpayer in New Zealand should be able to expect.These situations actually exist across all of our wait-lists. There are variations across the country in various different access criteria in different districts so there is an opportunity to go through each of them and identify opportunities for standardisation. I know officials at Te Whatu Ora are working on that and they'll progress that as opportunities present themselves. Of course the other important thing with wait-lists with that allocation of funds—$118 million—is to make sure that we continue to push for wait-list reductions. I'm very pleased to report that I have been advised the wait-lists are reducing in all parts of the country and that challenge of moving through with the ultra-long waiters is going incredibly well—for example all people waiting over three years have had their surgery. They're working through people who have been waiting for a second year. Te Whatu Ora's target is for no one to be waiting for longer than one year and at the end of this year other than for orthopaedics where that will take a little longer—but there is a similar plan for that and those plans correspond to targets for each part of the country. Those targets have been allocated and are monitored week by week.