Canberra Health Services has walked back a proposal to block non-ACT residents from accessing specialist appointments at the Canberra Hospital. The hospital is auditing its massive patient backlog which the health minister concedes is so long, some patients may never see the doctor they're waiting for.
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00:00Inside the Canberra Hospital around one in five patients comes from over the border in New South Wales.
00:09But for a short time Canberra Hospital had considered barring these patients from seeing ACT specialists.
00:17One of Canberra's leading dermatologists learned of the proposal last month.
00:22The proposal is that people who are referred from interstate won't get onto our clinic waiting lists.
00:31So the referrals will be automatically refused at an administrative level.
00:35Today the ACC Health Minister was clear that plan is now firmly off the table.
00:41This proposal has been considered and rejected by Canberra Health Services.
00:46The proposal was one of a suite of changes put forward by the Canberra Hospital to cut down its massive patient backlog.
00:54Another is an audit of existing wait lists.
01:05That policy has also not been formally endorsed but the government has conceded it may effectively become the reality for less urgent patients.
01:14If you're a category 3 patient on a wait list and you've already been waiting two years for a service
01:20and you're nowhere near the top of that list and you're unlikely to receive that service, we need to understand that.
01:27We are not ever going to be able to improve our waiting lists.
01:30We're not ever going to be able to get beyond category 1 so long as we have so few dermatologists in Canberra.
01:36Canberra GPs say some interstate patients have already been knocked back from other types of specialist appointments.
01:43If my patients are in New South Wales, if I try to refer them to dieticians at the Canberra Hospital,
01:49that service is closed to them even if they have complex conditions such as heart failure or chronic kidney disease
01:55where they're probably best to have close liaison with their treating team.
01:58We're the tertiary referral centre for the area but we do wish that we would be paid fairly by New South Wales.
02:06The issue has brought to light the growing frustration of ACT Health
02:10which wants to be paid a small jurisdiction premium for treating New South Wales residents.
02:15We're about to invest more than a billion dollars in a new hospital.
02:19We know that around 20% of patients in that hospital will come from surrounding southern New South Wales
02:24and yet New South Wales is not contributing anything to that capital infrastructure.
02:29An expensive cross-border battle.