The sound of a rescue helicopter landing at The Canberra Hospital can herald bad news for patients waiting to undergo elective surgery (and those in the emergency department waiting room too).
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As the region's major trauma centre, the hospital will of course always prioritise the treatment of the critically-injured over people whose need for surgery is less urgent.
The hospital tries to run its surgical program in such a way that emergency surgery only causes the least amount of disruption to elective lists possible. But this doesn't always work in practice.
Part of Chief Minister Katy Gallagher's vision for the local hospital system is to have more elective surgery performed at Calvary Public Hospital to allow Canberra Hospital to focus on emergencies and more complicated cases.
The Government has begun outsourcing some elective surgery to the private sector to try and cut long waiting lists.
Frustratingly for the ACT Government, just over the border in Queanbeyan lies an almost brand new (it opened in 2008 at a cost of $51 million), hospital which operates significantly below its capacity.
Using the Queanbeyan Hospital for elective surgery has the potential to take pressure off The Canberra Hospital.
The elective surgery trial is a political win for Ms Gallagher, who will face a no-confidence motion over her handling of the health system next week.
Interestingly, Ms Gallagher never managed to convince the former NSW Labor government to make greater use of Queanbeyan Hospital and help reduce the flow of patients over the border to Canberra.
But Liberal Health Minister Jillian Skinner has seen the sense in at least conducting a trial of the ACT performing elective surgery at Queanbeyan.
About one third of the patients on ACT elective surgery waiting lists are from NSW.
Canberrans are sometimes prone to complain about NSW patients using "our" hospitals.
But without adding south-east NSW to Canberra Hospital's catchment area to bring the population up to 500,000, the hospital would be unable to justify funding for many of the services it operates.
That would mean a lot more Canberrans would have to travel to Sydney or Melbourne for hospital treatment.
