Nicola Roxon (Gellibrand, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Health and Ageing) Share this | Hansard source

We are at a crucial point for the future of electronic health development in Australia.

Given the key role that e-health will play in reforming Australia’s health system, progressing e-health is vital for the future direction of the health reform agenda.

For more than three months the government have wanted the Senate to consider the Healthcare Identifiers Bill 2010. We want to get on with implementing e-health, but these attempts have been blocked by the Liberal Party, by their delay and their dithering.

The bill sitting in the Senate as I speak today seeks to establish a single national healthcare identifier system for patients, healthcare providers and healthcare provider organisations.

This new identifier system will facilitate reliable healthcare related communications, support the management of patient information in an electronic environment and provide the foundations necessary to support the development of a national e-health record system.

Put simply, this is like building Highway 1, the main backbone of the new e-health system. Without unique healthcare identifiers there cannot be an integrated, consistent, national e-health system in Australia. We have to build the highway which will allow each and every healthcare provider and consumer to connect to a national system.

Electronic health records will help revolutionise the delivery of health care in Australia. That is why last month’s budget included almost $467 million to roll out personally controlled electronic health records for all Australians from 2012-13.

This investment will establish a secure, personally controlled electronic health record system that will provide:

• summaries of patients’ health information—including medication and immunisation summaries, and results of diagnostic tests;
• secure access for patients and healthcare providers to their e-health records via the internet;
• rigorous governance and oversight to maintain privacy; and
• the national standards, planning and core national infrastructure required to use the national system.

Patients will, for the first time, be able to access their key health information when and where they need it. Patients will no longer have to remember every detail of their care history, medications or test results and have to retell it to every health professional that they see.

It is estimated that two to three per cent of hospital admissions in Australia are linked to medication errors, which equates to 190,000 admissions each year and costs our health system $660 million per annum. And about eight per cent of medical errors are because of inadequate patient information.

E-health will save lives, reduce medical errors, keep people out of hospital and save money for the taxpayer.

Nine of the National Health and Hospitals Reform Commission’s 123 recommendations deal with the need to progress e-health, including a recommendation to introduce healthcare identifiers by July 2010—that is just next week—and individual electronic health records by 2012.

The government has worked hard to progress these reforms as a priority and to progress the legislation.

We referred the bill to the Senate Standing Committee on Community Affairs to allow for more community consultation on the bill after two rounds of consultation last year.

Stakeholders including the Australian Medical Association, the Australian Nursing Federation, the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners, the Royal College of Pathologists of Australasia, industry and the Consumer Health Forum of Australia all outlined the critical need for this legislation to be passed.

The committee recommended the passage of the bills without amendment.

However, following further consultation on the draft regulations and the recommendations proposed by the coalition in its minority report, the government has been prepared to propose amendments to the bill and regulations to respond to some of the issues raised.

Despite this, the coalition are still yet to commit to supporting the legislation and have announced that they would cut the budget funding to roll out e-health records—defying the almost unanimous support in the health sector for e-health.

The coalition have abandoned, unfortunately, more than a decade of bipartisan support for e-health reform and once again embraced the health funding cuts agenda they pursued when they were last in government.

This contradicts three specific speeches that Mr Abbott, the Leader of the Opposition, gave as Minister for Health and Ageing calling for e-health records.

Indeed, he based his first speech as the new health minister in 2003 on the need for e-health records. He gave his government five years to implement a national scheme or it would be an ‘indictment against everyone in the system, including the government’.

The member for Dickson, sitting at the table today, is also on the record as offering bipartisan support for e-health. Last September he stated the lack of e-health was a ‘very poor reflection on the last decade of discussion’.

The shadow Treasurer told parliament in 2008 that ‘there was a very bipartisan agreement’ on e-health.

After the Liberal decision to cut the next tranche of funding announced in this year’s budget was widely condemned by the AMA, the ANF, the AGPN and other stakeholders, Andrew Robb, the opposition finance spokesperson, declared they would not support e-health as there was no ‘individual identifier’ in place.

Today is the opportunity to change that. I say to the Leader of the Opposition, the shadow Treasurer, the member for Dickson and the member for Goldstein: here is the chance to right the wrongs of the last decade. Here is the chance to demonstrate that the Liberal Party is serious about health reform.

The decision to introduce a national approach to identification for patients and providers was made as far back as 2006 by COAG—under the Howard government. The decision was then affirmed in November 2008 when COAG agreed to universally allocate healthcare identifiers to all healthcare recipients in Australia.

Now it is crunch time for the Liberal Party. This is an opportunity to stop standing in the way of this building block for e-health in Australia. Clinicians, patients, industry and business all see this legislation as vital to improving patient care and efficiency in the health system.

There is much at stake with this legislation. Building a national e-health system depends upon having a secure, consistent foundation to correctly identify all records. Allocating healthcare identifiers for all Australians provides that foundation.

Personally controlled electronic health records will require specific safeguards, in separate legislation and governance arrangements.

The Liberal Party must think carefully about whether they want to risk consigning our health system to languishing under a paper based system or whether they want to support taking a big leap into the 21st century with this legislation.

The government has consulted often and widely on this legislation—with two rounds of public consultation, three independent privacy impact assessments, and the Senate committee all examining the design and operation of the identifiers service and legislation.

It is time for the Liberal Party to stop playing politics with patients and either support this legislation or step aside and allow the Rudd government to get on with the job it was elected to do.

So today I call on the Liberal Party and the shadow minister here at the table to state on the record if they will stand with the patients who want this, with the clinicians who want this and with the healthcare stakeholders who want this, or if they will continue to consign our health system to the paper records of the last century.

This is the choice that the Liberal Party face, and this is why this is a matter of such importance to be discussed in the chamber today.

We can consign e-health to the last century. We can leave it there, languishing with paper records. That may be where the Liberal Party’s health policies belong, but they should not stand in the way of such fundamental reform to our health system any longer.

We want the Liberal Party to stop playing games with this piece of legislation, acknowledge the government’s genuine attempts to address the issues raised during the consultation and allow the bills to pass the Senate this week.

I ask the shadow minister to please indicate today and advise the House in his reply if the Liberal Party will allow this legislation to pass in the Senate in the remaining few days before the winter recess and before the all-important 1 July start date.

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