Peter Dutton (Dickson, Liberal Party, Minister for Health) Share this | Hansard source

A fair point of order, Madam Speaker. The member rightly points out that in his electorate he has 95,000 people who hold private health insurance. Bear in mind that the member for Sydney, the former health minister, claimed that it was a great day for the country—the rollout of the personally controlled electronic health record, referred to affectionately as the PCEHR.

When you consider that 95,000 people within just the electorate of Reid have private health insurance, you would have thought that one of the achievements of the member for Sydney would have been that private health insurance patients, when they went into a hospital, could have had their record accessed and updated in that private hospital. We know that around 40 per cent of hospital patients are treated in private hospitals. And yet I explained to the House last week that, in the formation of the personally controlled electronic health record, the previous government forgot to speak to doctors and public hospitals about this record. But now it turns out that they forgot to speak to private hospitals. I will ask for the help of my colleagues here: you would have thought that, of 95,000 people, what—50,000?

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