Nearly 4000 people remain on a waiting list for an endoscopy in Canberra's public health system as the Health Minister admits a key election commitment will not be delivered.
Endoscopies were supposed to increase by 5000 a year over recent years with promised upgrades to facilities at Canberra Hospital but these have been delayed.
But while the government has fallen short of its target, an expanded endoscopy suite has opened at the North Canberra Hospital and authorities are hopeful this can tackle the list.
A new room to conduct endoscopies along with refurbishments to existing rooms and new equipment has been installed at the hospital as part of a more than $1.4 million upgrade. It will allow for an extra 2000 procedures a year.
"It really is a significant increase in the capacity for public endoscopy services," Health Minister Rachel Stephen-Smith said.
Canberra's public health system has struggled with endoscopy procedures over recent years. The waiting list has been higher than 7000 at points and this has prompted a full audit of the waiting list.
ACT Labor committed to spend $16 million over three years in the 2020 campaign to upgrade and expand existing endoscopy facilities at Canberra Hospital. This commitment was expected to deliver 5000 extra procedures a year by 2023.
Ms Stephen-Smith said this commitment was not delivered. She said this had been due to changes in location and the timeline of work at Canberra Hospital, including the expansion.
She said the expansion of the endoscopy will not occur until after the new critical services building opens, with work scheduled to start next year.
"Unfortunately the expectation around that was that we would be able to invested in the infrastructure at Canberra Hospital more quickly and so there's been a combination of some of the changes in decision-making about where we were going to invest in that new capacity at Canberra Hospital," Ms Stephen-Smith said.
There has been a separate list of procedures between Canberra Health Services and North Canberra Hospital, formerly Calvary Public Hospital Bruce.
Canberra Health Services, not including North Canberra Hospital, does about 5500 endoscopies a year. Procedures have also been outsourced to Queanbeyan Hospital.
North Canberra Hospital already does about 2000 endoscopies a year. The upgrade will allow the hospital to take an extra 1500 to 2000 procedures in a year, and will be used to help with the existing waiting list for Canberra Health Services.
There are about 3900 on the waiting list.
Upper endoscopies can be used to diagnose stomach and oesophageal cancer, whereas lower endoscopies - otherwise known as colonoscopies - can be used to diagnose bowel cancer.
The endoscopy suite upgrades at North Canberra Hospital include equipment which was described as the "Rolls Royce of equipment" by gastroenterologist James Riddell.
Dr Riddell said he did not think the equipment could get much better but the latest model has been a great improvement.
"We just see the lining of the bowel much more clearly, we can pick up polyps, we can get down to seeing individuals cells now with some of the functions on these bits of equipment so they're wonderful," he said.
Dr Riddell said the boost to capacity would double the number of procedures they could undertake, provided there were enough staff on hand. He spoke about the potential of training nurses to do the procedures, which happens overseas but not so much in Australia.
"We have had one public room running now for many, many years and we use it pretty much full time. So we get maybe 1500 to 2000 cases done per year," he said.
