Australia's peak medical body says Canberra desperately needs more beds across its hospitals to ease pressure on emergency departments.
It comes after the latest Australian Institute of Health and Welfare report revealed ACT's emergency departments were once again the worst performing compared to all other states and territories.
The median wait time for ACT patients at emergency departments was longer than anywhere else in the country.
ACT Health Minister Rachel Stephen-Smith said "apples to apples" comparisons with other jurisdictions did not give the full picture, but conceded even when compared to its direct peers Canberra hospitals did not perform well enough.
ACT Australian Medical Association president Antonio Di Dio said the biggest immediate problem was finding additional beds to get patients out of the emergency department and onto a ward.
"Bed block remains a major problem and it's hard to see this being resolved short of new beds being delivered and major initiatives to reduce the number of ED presentations," he said.
"Not only do we need new beds but we have to look at a more efficient system across the board."
Dr Di Dio said the government needed to better resource the system.
"It really is time we all sat down and had a long discussion about funding and allocating our scarce health resources in the ACT," he said.
Ms Stephen-Smith said there were clear challenges at both Canberra and Calvary hospitals.
"That's partly around the operation of our emergency department, but it's also around ensuring that we get good patient flow through our hospital system and there's a lot of work that's been going on in that regard," she said.
"In particular over the recent weeks there's been a direct admission process established so that emergency department consultants could actually directly admit patients into the appropriate ward within Canberra Hospital, rather than waiting for a consultant or a registrar to come down to the department to agree to that admission."
Ms Stephen-Smith said the ACT needed a better deal from NSW, with growth in the payments it received for treating the state's patients currently capped at 2 per cent.
About 25 per cent of all patients treated in the ACT were from NSW.
Ms Stephen-Smith said while she hoped the ACT could move from the bottom of the pack on waiting times, the national report did not give an "apples to apples" comparison.
"It's unlike any other jurisdiction, we don't have those smaller general hospitals where there's probably virtually no waiting time in the emergency department to balance out the busy metropolitan hospitals," she said.
But she acknowledged even on a peer hospital comparison, Canberra's hospitals were not doing as well as they should.
"We've always had the kinds of pressures but they've probably got more significant as our population and the population of southern NSW has grown and aged," she said.
"But no, I don't want to be at the bottom of that list, I'd like to see us improve enough that we're not."
Opposition health spokeswoman Giulia Jones said the government needed to indicate how it was going to improve infrastructure and staffing levels.
"This is a very basic and normal part of running hospitals," she said.
"I'm not asking for perfection, I'm asking the minister to actually give us some information about how things will improve.
"It has a lot to do with attitude, I think we should no longer accept being the bottom of the pack."
