Health is shaping up to be a key battleground of the ACT election, as both Labor and the Liberals pledge to splash cash on the Aboriginal health sector.
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ACT Labor has promised $12 million to build a community health clinic for the Winnunga Nimmityjah Aboriginal health service if it wins government.
It comes after the ACT Liberals last month vowed to bolster its number of social health workers and use $1.3 million of budgeted money to design a building at its Narrabundah site.
Assistant Health Minister Meegan Fitzharris said community health services such as Winnunga played a critical role in providing "holistic" and "culturally skilled, sensitive and responsive" health services and programs.
"Winnunga is an invaluable health service to the ACT's Indigenous community," she said. "Winnunga is seeing demand for its services grow, and it needs a new, modern health-care facility to better service their clients."
Winnunga chief executive Julie Tongs said the commitments showed bipartisan recognition of the important work the Narrabundah clinic carried out.
"We've grown from a very small health service in the back of the old Griffin Centre 28 years ago to a service that has 6000 clients and about 4800 regular clients," Ms Tongs said.
"We've got the staff to put in the building, it's just having a building that functions. I have nine GPs at Winnunga and a social health team that consists of eight Aboriginal counsellors and support staff as well as nurses, midwives and allied health professionals and we also have administration in the building.
"We have Centrelink come down to Winnunga, we also have probation and parole and we run our programs out of a little room opposite the shops, so we're packed to the rafters where we are. We run our diabetes clinic out of the board room, and that's not ideal."
Demand for Winnunga's drug, alcohol and mental health support services had exploded in the past few years but Ms Tongs said they didn't even have counselling rooms.
"We don't have a safe place to take people, other than outside, and it's not ideal when somebody's having a psychotic episode to be outside talking them down or bringing them down [outside] when really they should be in a private room somewhere," Ms Tongs said.
An ACT Labor spokesman said the intention was to build the facility from scratch on a new site but it would work with Winnunga to make sure its needs were met.
