Dave Peffer, formerly the deputy chief executive of Canberra Health Services, has now stepped into the top role following the resignation of Bernadette McDonald.

He is currently interim chief executive, with the recruitment process for the position underway.

Mr Peffer has walked into the job in a turbulent time, although he says in healthcare there is never a quiet period.

The organisation faces deep cultural issues, significant performance problems and the looming risk of COVID-19 alongside the juggle to ensure the workforce can keep up with vaccination and testing demand.

As a key part of setting up the surge centre on an oval beside the hospital last year, Mr Peffer said it could become a specialised COVID-19 patient centre should the hospital be overrun.

"It is an emergency department ... if we had to activate that and use it as an emergency area if had a widespread outbreak, we would do that," Mr Peffer said.

He said the area could be overhauled from a vaccination space to accept patients overnight.

"If we were to have a serious outbreak tomorrow ... and [the chief health officer's] instruction was tomorrow we need an emergency room, it would be an emergency room."

In an organisation riddled with cultural issues, Mr Peffer said things were changing but there was "a long way to" to address many culture issues, as recommendations of a review of workplace culture across ACT health services are being implemented.

He said two things were key to improve culture across Canberra Health Services.

The first, ensuring staff weren't overworked.

"[Overworking staff will] drive cultural problems in a service, there's no getting around that," he said.

"That's something all services are grappling with in terms of volume and demand ... we've got a busy workforce that's covering the [COVID-19] vaccination effort, testing effort as well as running a very, very busy health service.

"The second part of creating that great culture is recognising everyone actually has a role to play."

He said a program was being rolled out to "build confidence" in staff to call out bullying or other behaviour and be able to escalate those matters.

"Things are changing, people feel like they have a clearer purpose, they feel like they belong to an institution and that it's actually going somewhere and we know we have a long way to go," Mr Peffer said.

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The hospital expansion promising more emergency department beds and an improved "patient flow and patient experience" was hoped to aid continually disappointing emergency wait times.

The ACT branch of the Australian Medical Association say the problem occurs before people even reach the hospital, because they aren't able to get the help they need in the community.

The ACT branch president Walter Abhayaratna argued with better access to care from general practitioners and other health services outside of the hospital, pressure on the emergency department would ease.

Mr Peffer agreed the "clunky" system for patients moving between their general practitioner to the hospital or a specialist needed to be fixed.

"The AMA is absolutely correct, that is the future," Mr Peffer said.

"That is one of the areas we're working on, in terms of integrating care between the sectors to try and minimise the number of people that need to work through that clunky interface."

He said a group of endocrinologists were piloting a model where patients were seen at GP clinics with their doctor sitting alongside the specialist.

"So it's not a referral to the acute care system [and] it's upskilling the GP," Mr Peffer said.

Canberra has the lowest number of GPs per population in the country. Improving access to local doctors was a critical part of improving Canberra's health system, Mr Peffer said.

"There's no doubt" the small number of GPs available impacted pressure on other services, Mr Peffer said.

"GPs are going to be key in this city and the partnerships we can form with GPs will either make or break whether we can introduce an [improved] system that works," he said.

Mr Peffer was the deputy chief executive of CHS since August 2019.

Prior to that he worked in several government directorates including ACT Health, Community Services, and Access Canberra.

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