Rachel Stephen-Smith says authorities are planning for public holiday disruption to the health system

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced the one-off public holiday for Thursday, September 22 over the weekend.

Health Minister Rachel Stephen-Smith said health authorities were working on a plan for any disruptions that may occur as a result of the public holiday.

"We will need to look at the impact on elective surgery for that day, both at Canberra Hospital and Calvary Public Hospital and I'm sure the private hospitals will be doing the same thing," she said.

Ms Stephen-Smith said that as of Monday morning authorities had not had an opportunity to work through plans for the public holiday. She expected an announcement would be made on Monday afternoon.

She said anybody who was directly affected by the changes would be directly contacted and health authorities would look at ways to ensure appointments were rescheduled in a prompt manner.

"We'll be looking at how we can adjust on the days and weeks around that to ensure that everyone who did have appointments or does have appointments on that day will be able to be supported to get their health care as quickly as possible if it's not going to go ahead on that day," Ms Stephen-Smith said.

MORE HEALTH NEWS:

Ms Stephen-Smith said authorities were also considering what services could continue as normal and whether elective surgeries will be able to proceed on the public holiday as already scheduled.

"Many of our services are 24/7 in relation to emergency departments, walk-in centres so we'll continue to offer all of those services," she said.

"For those services that don't normally operate on weekends and public holidays, we'll be working through each of those to determine what the impact is going to be.

"Most elective surgeries do happen between Monday and Friday and it may be that we decide to continue with the elective surgeries that were planned for that day and just proceed as if it is any other day."

Some elective surgeries were postponed during the winter Omicron wave due to staffing shortages and authorities are trying to make up for the backlog.

Elective surgeries in the territory's public health system have already been disrupted due to the government's transition to its new digital health record system.

Some surgeries have been shifted to the public health system as more than 14,000 health workers will be trained in the new system over coming months.

The territory has missed its elective surgery targets over recent years.

We've made it a whole lot easier for you to have your say. Our new comment platform requires only one log-in to access articles and to join the discussion on The Canberra Times website. Find out how to register so you can enjoy civil, friendly and engaging discussions. See our moderation policy here.