Kat THEOPHANOUS (Northcote): Deputy Speaker, it is always –

Jess Wilson: Deputy Speaker, I just draw your attention to the state of the house.

Quorum formed.

Kat THEOPHANOUS: As I was saying, Deputy Speaker, it is wonderful to have you in the chair and to follow the wonderful member for Bass, who made an incredible contribution just then. I rise to speak in support of the Health Legislation Amendment (Information Sharing) Bill 2023. I am prouder than ever to be standing in this place representing the community of Northcote as part of a re-elected Andrews Labor government, because I know our government is here again for one simple reason: to do what needs to be done to make things better for all Victorians. We make things better by building better schools so our kids can learn and thrive, we make things better by building a better transport network so we can all get to where we need to go safely when we need to get there, we make things better by bringing back the SEC to lower our emissions and our energy bills, we make things better by building better hospitals to ensure we have got world-class places to go to get the treatment and care we need when we need it most and we make things better by listening to our health experts when they tell us they need better tools to be able to provide the highest level of care, because that is what we are about and that is why the people of Victoria put us here.

No-one is in any doubt that our health system is under immense pressure. We have an aging population, a mental health system in the process of reform, the impacts of a global pandemic – which has meant a huge effort is needed to catch up on delayed care – and worldwide staffing shortages. It is no wonder that our healthcare workers are under enormous pressure. As we continue our recovery from the shocks and disruptions we have experienced over the past few years, we continue to learn so many things about ourselves, our communities, our systems of government and the systems within which we deliver our public services. We have learned a lot about our own resilience, the power of simple acts of kindness and compassion. We have learned how challenging it can be when we are isolated and alone.

We know, as the government that has been elected to lead, that we can never become complacent or stop working to improve our essential public services and the systems that they rely on. We know we can create a more efficient and integrated health service. Information sharing is absolutely a critical part of that because the truth is it is a fragmented system, a system within which patient information is siloed and inaccessible from one public health service to the next. The problem that fragmentation and siloed information is causing for our already stretched clinicians is one of needless delay, frustration and sometimes despair. For healthcare workers that is not abstract; it is the clenched-up feeling, the knot inside when they are unable to deliver the treatments their patients need when their patients need it because they find themselves waiting for a fax to come through from a neighbouring hospital containing test results that are critical to making a diagnosis. All the while the clock ticks down, the odds narrow and the prognosis gets worse. This is quite literally putting the lives of patients presenting to our emergency departments at risk.

Thankfully we know that we have the tools and technology we need to fix the problem, and with this bill we have the legislative framework within which we can do so safely and securely – because of course we are not blind to the challenges that building this new system presents and the safeguards that we need to be built into it from the very start to make it safe. We know that patients have the right to their health information remaining private and secure. We know that only specified healthcare workers who are directly involved in a person’s care and treatment should be able to access medical information for the sole purpose of providing treatment. We know that our systems for storing sensitive information must be secure and stringently protected. We know that strict controls need to be made to designate who can access which information and when, and we know that there need to be serious penalties put in place to prevent prohibited access and unauthorised disclosure of a patient’s private information. That is exactly what this bill will do.

It will establish an independent oversight committee, supported by a clinical advisory group, to advise the Secretary of the Department of Health on the implementation and successful operation of the system before it comes into being. Included in their remit will be an obligation to establish the appropriate risk, control and compliance frameworks as well as a primary management framework, which will limit the access to and management of highly sensitive health information. So despite what some of the fearmongering Luddites over there on the other side of the house might have us all believe, this bill is not about taking away anyone’s rights. This kind of narrative skirts dangerously close to some of the misinformation we already witnessed during the pandemic, and we do not entertain that kind of thing. We know that this bill will save lives. It will assist our health workers, our mental health workers and our clinicians right across Victoria, who are working under intense circumstances to do their vital work. This bill is about bringing a healthcare system that is still reliant on 19th-century technology here to meet the needs of all of us living in the 21st century. It does this by equipping our doctors, our ambos and our nurses with the tools that they keep telling us they need so they can do their jobs properly here in 2023.

The first commercial fax service began operating in 1865, predating even the telephone, and frankly I reckon it is time for retirement. I know there are some across the chamber who may wish for our society to remain in the 1800s, but it is pretty astounding to think that in 2023 critical patient treatment right across our public health system is still being delayed because doctors and nurses are having to wait for faxes to come through from other public health providers. It is devastating when you think of the frustration they must feel when they find out, after being forced to send their patients off for ever more tests, that it was all unnecessary because they have been blind to the existence of the same test results sitting siloed in a filing cabinet at another public health provider. Without reform and modernisation, our hardworking healthcare workers will continue to be forced to spend unnecessary hours wrestling with an unwieldy system which is ill equipped to handle the increasing demands of our rapidly growing society. Through this bill the Andrews Labor government is modernising our healthcare system so that all Victorians are able to safely access the healthcare treatments they need when they need them most.

As we know, the Andrews government is investing big to build the hospitals Victoria needs now and into the future – in fact one of them, the Victorian Heart Hospital, opened its doors this week. We do this because we know that as our state grows we must grow the system of public health infrastructure to match. Now this bill is not about building anything physically tangible or as exciting as our government’s heart hospital or the recently announced Parkville and Arden hospital precincts – to be fair, it is hard to be as exciting as Australia’s biggest hospital infrastructure project, especially when it involves $5 billion to $6 billion in investment that will boost research, create jobs and create these new campuses. Nonetheless, I diverge – this bill is equally as important and relevant because this bill will enable us to build something that will benefit every one of the thousands of Victorians who interact with our public health system each and every day. We will do this because we know we need to listen to those who are out there each day working in our public health system. Victoria’s public healthcare workers are world class – world class. We know that when they tell us they need better tools at their disposal to enable them to deliver world-leading public health care, we need to listen.

In preparing this bill we also listened to and considered the recommendations of the Targeting Zero and Strengthening Medicare Taskforce reports. Through these reports we were given a clear diagnosis: the public health information sharing system we are currently using is not working. So I think it is clear what we need to do and why we need to do it: we need to use the technology we have at hand today to secure the healthcare system we need now and in decades to come. We need to do this to free up our ambos, our doctors, our nurses, our public healthcare workers and our clinicians more broadly so they can all get back to what they went into this industry to do in the first place – to help treat all of us when we are sick, when we need that care, when we are in dire straits. Despite all the frustration of this current system, we know we can do better, and I am proud to be part of the Andrews Labor government because I know that we will always look for those ways to do better and those ways to help those people that spend their lives giving back to us. I would like to say thank you to the minister for bringing this bill to the house for debate. It is an excellent bill. I commend it, and I will leave my contribution there.