Western Australia has recorded another month of record ambulance ramping, despite the postponement of 100 elective surgeries to free up much needed hospital beds. The state government has played down the worsening figures, saying hospitals all over the country have been gripped by an increase in demand because of a severe flu season.
00:00Flanked by two of five health portfolio ministers, the Premier and co all smiles for works underway at Bunbury Regional Hospital costing $471 million.
00:15So this redevelopment is incredibly important for delivering access to health care for Western Australians here in regional Bunbury and the areas that surround it.
00:23They were there to celebrate a construction milestone but were pressed on new figures showing ambulance ramping in August hit a record high, breaking the previous record set in July.
00:35The Premier says WA's ramping issues are not unique.
00:39I sat up last night, I googled South Australia ramping, you see headlines, crisis, record numbers of ramping, New South Wales ramping, you see record numbers of call outs for ambulance services, Queensland ramping.
00:52This is the line of hours ambulances spent ramped outside of WA hospitals dating back to July 2015.
01:01It spiked around here because of the pandemic but as you can see it's taken off again in the past two months, soaring to a record high.
01:11Ramping is always worse in winter. We know the flu has an impact on ramping numbers so ramping will go down as we move into summer.
01:20If it doesn't then we're facing an entirely different scenario, one that we haven't had to deal with before.
01:25The opposition wants money to be diverted to throw at the problem.
01:29People ask me, well what would you do? I tell you what I would do, I tell you what our team would do, we would scrap the Burrswood Park racetrack today.
01:38Mr Zemplis declaring he'd take the $217 million marked for the controversial racetrack precinct in Burrswood and put it straight into the hospital system.
01:48A government spokesperson responding saying strong economic management means they can manage multiple projects at the same time.
01:57It's not all that many people do, but a lot of people say anything, but there's a lot of reasons they don't have to deal with of a very difficult problem but the proportion of things have to deal with it.
02:05So, more than we would have to deal with this in a long way, and then we're not going to deal with it.
02:09We wouldn't do that. It's not about a problem.
02:13We would have to deal with that.
02:14Our plan of war is that we would have to deal with this sort of policy and to make it more difficult.
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