Craig LizDr LIZ CRAIG (Labour): Thank you Mr Speaker. It's an absolute privilege to speak in my first general debate. What I want to talk about today is the absolute dire state of our health system. I mean everybody's been focusing at the moment on the state of the Middlemore Hospital buildings and they're talking about that toxic mould growing on the walls. They are talking about leaking sewage. What they're also saying is the district health board (DHB) CEOs talking about the fact that they were too reluctant to actually go back to the Government to get some more money to fix it because of that whole pressure to stay in surplus to balance the books.The question is well what has been happening beyond that in our health system? Before the election there was a lot of talk—and I used these figures—about a $2.3 billion underspend. The whole sense of that was that the previous Government hadn't been keeping up with those basic cost pressures: population growth and staff wages. We were accumulating that gradual gradual deficit in our health funding going on.I think the problem though when I think about what was happening in my own DHB and what's happening now across the health sector what my colleagues are telling me—$2.3 billion is kind of hard to understand. You don't really capture what's been happening. But for me thinking about it what has been happening—the best analogy I can think about is when I used to work in A & E and we used to see these patients coming in with slow internal bleeding. I think the problem was when we used to work in A & E people would come in with trauma and you'd jump on to it straight away. You'd see it you'd put pressure on you'd give them IV fluids and you'd sort it out. But the ones we used to get taught about to be careful of were those slow bleeders—the one you get with that gradual gradual dripping away loss of blood volume. What had happened was you'd send them up to the ward you'd send them home and they'd suddenly crash. So the problem was that it was those ones who were actually much more sinister.When I think about our own health system and what's been happening there—the first sign something was going wrong in those patients was that their heart rate would start to go up. They'd start to have their heart beating faster to get that blood round the system. And what I see in our own health workforce is they've been working harder and harder in order to keep things happening. Because they're committed to their patients because they believe in what they're doing they're burning themselves out. What we are seeing in our A & Es is those staff working really really long shifts. What I'm seeing across our midwifery is those midwives are working really really long hours putting all that effort in. And what I'm seeing in our mental health system is these health professionals taking on this burden of care and it's starting to burn them out.What was concerning me was some of these people I've been talking to the health workforce said initially that they were doing it out of love for their patients out of care for what they were doing. But now they're starting to burn out and give up and they're starting to walk away. So we've got a real problem there.But the other thing is when a patient starts to decompensate further they shut down the periphery to divert all the blood flow up to the core heart the brain the lungs—the really important bits. What's been happening in my own DHB is the DHB's been diverting anything away that it can—the electives. Basically anything that's not urgent has been diverted away to core business like the acute A & Es so those with chronic medical conditions are missing out.The number of people that came to me over the last few months talking about how they were in absolute agony with hip pain with knee pain—they're in wheelchairs when they shouldn't be. They are having to give up work because they can't get the operations they need. There were delayed cancer diagnoses because they can't get a colonoscopy waiting months and months—six months eight months for an ultrasound scan. Patients have been suffering. It's not just an academic exercise with this $2.3 billion; it's having a real impact down where I live.The problem is though the DHBs can't divert that blood flow away from anywhere else because they're overflowing in their A & E departments. There are people coming in with acute respiratory infectious diseases. And so our health system is starting to shut down. The problem is with a patient if you don't stop the bleeding eventually they crash. Then what happens is you need to get in and put in a massive resuscitation effort with a massive bolus of IV fluids. And that's what our health system is needing at the moment: a massive cash injection just to stand still to restore that blood pressure.I think the problem is that the previous Government prided themselves on being good economic managers but how I saw it was that they were starving the kids to pay the mortgage. But now what we find out is they weren't even paying the mortgage payments. What they were doing was kicking the can down the line so we're now up to $14 billion just in health infrastructure alone.Our Government is going to fix it but we can't do it all in one Budget. We may not even take one term. But we are committed to restoring our health services for New Zealand.