Chief Minister Katy Gallagher has launched urgent negotiations with the federal government in a bid to ensure the data doctoring scandal doesn't derail the ACT's attempts to win up to $3.3 million in extra health funding.
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Two reports published this week revealed up to 11,700 inappropriate changes had been made to Canberra Hospital emergency department waiting time data.
The Canberra Times revealed yesterday the hospital executive who had taken responsibility for most of the tampering was Critical Care chief Kate Jackson.
The data changes had effectively rendered irrelevant a series of targets for improving patient treatment time in Canberra's public hospital emergency departments.
The territory stood to gain an extra $800,000 in health funding from the federal government each year for four years from the end of 2012 if the targets could be met.
But the targets were based on the belief that in 2010, 55.8 per cent of emergency department patients were admitted to hospital or sent home within four hours of arriving.
A goal of increasing this to between about 60 and 64 per cent of patients had been set for this year.
But the Auditor-General's report showed the record doctoring meant the data for 2010 was wrong.
The government is yet to determine what the correct result was.
Ms Gallagher said: ''Essentially the baseline that we started from for meeting the next target … is clearly not correct.'' She was seeking an urgent meeting with federal Health Minister Tanya Plibersek to discuss the issue.
Ms Plibersek is currently on leave but Ms Gallagher said she had held an initial conversation with the federal minister's chief of staff.
The funding agreement contained a clause which allowed states and territories to ''catch up'' if they missed a target one year but met it in the next.
A spokesman for acting federal Health Minister Mark Butler said the Commonwealth would carefully examine the findings of the Auditor-General's inquiry but noted no reward funding had yet been paid. ''The findings of the inquiry into data manipulation at the Canberra Hospital will be examined closely by the Commonwealth to assess whether and how this might affect … its entitlement to the reward funding,'' the spokesman said.
Opposition Leader Zed Seselja said it seemed probable the ACT would miss out on bonus funding, at least in the short term.
''If we come into government, I think we would want to renegotiate on the fact that there has been this data fraud and try and get a better deal for Canberra,'' Mr Seselja said.
''But the prospect does seem tough based on these revelations.'' The ACT government and the Greens have rejected calls by the opposition for a Royal Commission into the data tampering scandal.
The government believes it would be extremely difficult for investigators to uncover the identities of people other than Ms Jackson who had changed records.
This is because generic log-ins such as ''nurse'', ''bedman'' and ''doctor'' were used by staff to log-in to the EDIS record-keeping system.
About 259 workstations in the Canberra Hospital had the EDIS system installed.
