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.
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