HEALTH FAILURES ‘STAGGERING’

Western Australia’s health system is very, very sick.

Our hospitals are forced to park stage four cancer patients on trolleys outside a public toilet.

Our ambulances and highly skilled paramedics are sitting for hours on end waiting for patients to be admitted, rather than attending other emergencies.

Yet another child has died in our hospitals in entirely preventable circumstances.

Yesterday, The West’s Josh Zimmerman reported about another child who would have died, if her mother had listened to doctors.

And, in a time of crisis, when West Australians need emergency medical care, they will probably need to attend one of the seven worst-performing emergency departments in the country.

Our State is better than that.

Our residents deserve better than that. We deserve a health system to be proud of.

After all, Roger Cook likes to constantly remind us WA is the engine room of the nation, the wealthiest State in the nation.

Despite the swollen coffers of the Government, the litany of failures in our health services is staggering.

No one should have to wait four years to see a specialist, or any health service.

No one’s health should deteriorate because they couldn’t get timely medical care.

Under Labor, while the royalties have rolled in, the elective surgery waitlist has blown out.

More than 30,000 people are now waiting for surgery. That’s more than the entire population of Albany.

The latest Child and Adolescent Health Service annual report says the number of kids waiting more than the recommended month for category one surgery — considered most urgent — has doubled to 10 per cent in the past year.

Two in five kids needing category three surgery — considered non-urgent but causing pain and dysfunction — are waiting more than a year for surgery.

While plenty of West Australians know about the elective surgery waiting list, few know about the hidden waiting list, unless they’ve experienced it themselves.

This is the waiting list the Health Minister refuses to acknowledge.

The hidden waiting list is the delay between seeing your GP, being referred, and getting an appointment.

It is blowing out for a range of conditions, often with disastrous consequences, forcing patients into the private system. Again, these West Australians, who can often ill-afford private surgical expenses, are not capture in the State Government’s official waiting list statistics.

As far as the Cook Government is concerned, these people sit in a statistical black hole.

It’s like having your washing on the clothesline and then claiming the washing’s done and the ironing basket is empty.

The Health Minister’s dogged refusal to even acknowledge the existence of the West Australians languishing on the hidden wait list points to a government more concerned with spin than cleaning up the mess in our health system.

Even Federal Labor Health Minister Mark Butler acknowledged these hidden waiting times have “serious detriment” to people’s health.

According to the Australian Medical Association, WA has declined on all four public health metrics they measure and is the worst performer in the country.

West Australians are being made to wait longer than they clinically should in every part of the health system.

In May of 2024, ambulances spent almost 5000 hours ramped outside WA hospitals.

That is nine times longer than they waited in May 2017.

In Opposition, Roger Cook said 1000 hours was a crisis.

That must mean 5000 hours is nothing short of a catastrophe of biblical proportions.

Ailments not addressed within a reasonable timeframe can lead to major complications, for both the individual needing care and the system itself.

Increasingly, patients — including cancer patients — are being treated in hospital corridors, often next to toilets, because there aren’t enough beds.

In 2013, Roger Cook called placing patients in corridors “unacceptable”.

A decade on, on his watch, it is common.

Our healthcare system is deteriorating, and West Australians’ health is deteriorating with it.

Another study by the AMA found SAC1 incidents — deaths or serious harm caused by clinical mistakes, rather than any illness or conditions — have risen by 21 per cent since 2017.

This includes incidents in which death or harm could have been prevented.

This means that 114 people — in the last year — died because of clinical mistakes.

That’s 114 deaths too many, due to a system that is under undeniable pressure.

Labor continues to throw fistfuls of money at METRONET, a project now 300 per cent or $13 billion over budget, while our health system and hospitals languish in neglect.

Ensuring our health system is appropriately resourced to help vulnerable patients should be the No. 1 priority.

Make no mistake, our doctors, nurses, paramedics and all the frontline staff do an incredible job.

They’re constantly being asked to do more with less, but they’re overworked in an overstretched system.

Despite the best efforts of staff in the circumstances, West Australians like Aishwarya Aswath, Ashleigh Hunter, and Sandipan Dhar deserved better than a government so grossly mismanaging our health system.

This is why a government I lead will ensure that there is full transparency and accountability in the reporting of waiting lists, and how the lists are managed. We will invest in our nurses, our clinics, and our hospitals to reduce both hidden and known wait lists.

We are committed to rebuilding our healthcare system to the world-class system it was seven years ago.