OUTRAGE over the state of the nation’s emergency wards shifted to Canberra at the weekend when a 30-year-old man died after allegedly waiting for four hours.

Reports suggest the man’s condition was not recognised by staff at Canberra Hospital on Saturday because he was slumped in a chair and it was assumed he was asleep.

A hospital spokeswoman said the man arrived late on Friday evening and was subsequently transferred to intensive care in the early hours of Saturday morning. He later died.

The state of public hospitals has become a major election issue, with Kevin Rudd threatening to strip control of the hospitals from the states if standards do not improve. At the weekend John Howard blamed poor hospital administration for the public’s loss of faith in public hospitals.

The NSW Government and state Health Minister Reba Meagher have been on the back foot since a mother, who miscarried in a toilet at Royal North Shore Hospital in Sydney after pleading for attention, came forward to tell her story.

Her experience elicited dozens of other reports of a third-world hospital system.

An Australian Institute of Health and Welfare report released last week showed the federal Government’s share of hospital funding dropped from 45 per cent to 41 per cent over the past decade, with the states meeting more of the bill.

The Canberra Hospital spokeswoman refused to comment on reports that the man, whose name has not been released, had waited for hours without attention.

“It is now a legal matter,” she said. “We cannot give any more detail because the matter has been referred to the coroner’s for investigation.”

The ACT’s Opposition health spokeswoman, Jacqui Burke, who has been a staunch critic of the territory’s rundown hospital system, said someone must face the blame for the man’s death.

Last month she said she was under pressure from the state health bureaucracy and the Australian Nursing Federation to tone down her criticisms.

“This is getting so dangerous now and you know we really need to hold this Government to account — they cannot keep saying it’s this or it’s that — start taking some responsibility,” she said.

“I’m just so frustrated that we’ve got to this point now that these poor people in emergency have been put in the most untenable position and as a result a life has been lost.”

She said the ACT Government had plenty of money to run the system but did not know how to manage it. “They have to take a long, hard look at the management practices. I think they have to take a look at how heavily bureaucratised the system has actually become.”

Acting Health Minister Simon Corbell was unavailable for comment.