The total cost of executive-level staff pay packets at ACT Health is expected to reach $8.1 million this year, up about 50 per cent during the past four years.
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While the rise in the total cost of Canberra's public health executives was due to increasing executive numbers, it also comes as increasing numbers of the senior staff have headed for the door in recent years.
Answers to Questions on Notice posed during legislative committee hearings earlier this year show the total bill for executive salaries rose from $5.4 million in 2013-14 to an estimated $8.1 million for 2016-17 - a period the directorate's executive ranks swelled from 22 to 29 in total.
The rising bill over the past four years has come as doctors and nurses at Canberra Hospital are in negotiations with ACT Health to draw up a new enterprise bargaining agreement, seeking pay rises, better conditions and leave entitlements as well as regulated nurse to patient ratios.
An ACT health spokeswoman said the growth in executive salaries was due to decisions made by the Remuneration Tribunal, but it was also a "direct response to the increasing demand for health services as our city grows" and increasingly complex cases.
But she would not detail how many of the new executive appointments were working in the directorate's $11.9 million System Innovation Program, except to confirm the "division of innovation" was led by a deputy director-general.
While the total number of executives employed at ACT Health has been rising in recent years, a growing number of long-term high-level staff have left the directorate.
The answers to Questions on Notice show the number of executive-level departures in the past three years jumped from two in 2013-14 to seven in 2015-16 and eight in 2016-17.
Those losses included senior long-term staffers Canberra Hospital's deputy director-general of clinical operations Ian Thompson, who left for consulting firm Nous Group this year, and the former director of the clinical safety and quality unit Elizabeth Trickett, who left after 35 years with ACT Health last year.
The directorate spent about $850,450 in pay-outs for all senior executive departures in the past four years, with $186,265 in 2013-14, none spent in 2014-15, $321,718 in 2015-16 and $342,467 this financial year.
