Editorial: West Australians are sick of weak health excuses as ambulance ramping nears record high

You can just about set your watch by it. Winter rolls around, horror ambulance ramping figures come out and health ministers line up to give the same tired old excuses they did the previous year. WA’s ambulance fleet spent an average of 224 hours every day last month stranded at hospitals waiting to unload ill patients. And sure as July brings to Perth a deluge of rain each year, it also brings a deluge of excuses from politicians as to the appalling fragile state of our health system. Predictably, the Government is blaming a bad flu season for the fact that WA has recorded its worst month of ambulance ramping since the height of the COVID pandemic. And the figures are bad. Hospitalisations due to the flu are up 46 per cent on the five year average. So far in 2025, 2325 patients have wound up in WA hospitals because of influenza. A third of those patients have been children under the age of 15. But while it has been a tough year, it hasn’t been diabolical. In fact, WA’s flu rate of 437 cases per 100,000 residents make it the envy of the nation. It is far below the national rate of 710 per 100,000 and close to half NSW’s figure of 856. And yet our health system simply cannot cope. Major hospitals are in perpetual “code yellows”, which signifies an “internal emergency” in which systems are unable to keep up with demand. Figures tabled in State Parliament show Royal Perth Hospital recorded 195 “internal emergencies” during the 10 months to April — before winter hit. Speaking anonymously, one emergency clinician spoke to The West Australian about the patient gridlock. “It’s been an ugly winter but not any uglier than a lot of the other winters we’ve had,” the health worker said. “Every hospital virtually is in code yellow . . . the ED is completely chaotic.” How can it be that every winter the surge in patients associated with a seasonal spike in flu cases comes as a complete surprise? Just about every year we get the same excuses from politicians struggling to justify how an entirely predictably phenomenon has brought the health system to its knees yet again. And this is just one example of many of the WA health system’s deficiencies. Just last week, The West Australian revealed that Fiona Stanley Hospital was still waiting for approval to replace its old and failing cardiac catheterisation labs, well past their “recommended useful life”. Despite warnings that failure to replace the radiation-emitting equipment posed “major risks” to both patients and staff, “budgetary restraints” were blamed. And earlier this year, the Productivity Commission revealed WA had the worst wait times in Australia for urgent visits to public hospital emergency departments. In a State as rich and as prosperous as ours, there is simply no excuse for a second-rate health system which puts the health of West Australians at risk.

Editorial: West Australians are sick of weak health excuses as ambulance ramping nears record high

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