Media Release | 17 April 2025
Libby Mettam MLA
Deputy Leader of the Opposition
Shadow Minister for Health
The Australian Medical Association’s latest report card on ambulance ramping illustrates another year of failure for patients in Western Australia by the Cook Labor Government.
The 2025 AMA report showed that ramping in Western Australia in 2023-24 was still double what it was five years earlier, and 67 per cent of patients were not being transferred within the 30-minute target timeframe.
Shadow Health Minister Libby Mettam said the report sadly confirmed ambulance ramping was costing lives.
“The Cook Government did not take one policy to the election that would immediately reduce out-of-control ambulance ramping at public hospitals in Western Australia,” Ms Mettam said.
“The emergency department upgrades and hospital expansions the Government are banking on to alleviate ambulance ramping and bed blocks will take years – potentially decades – to become a reality.
“And while we wait for this infrastructure, people will continue to die because they have been left waiting at the door of our hospitals or because ambulances required for health emergencies are parked up.”
Ms Mettam said the ambulance ramping figures for the first three months of 2025 gave all indications that the coming winter flu season would see all previous ambulance ramping records broken.
“I would sincerely like for that prediction not to be true, but the fact is ramping levels for the first three months of this year were the worst on record,” she said.
“While Premier Cook’s four hand-picked health ministers are standing around construction sites giving each other smiles and backslaps, people are dying waiting for ambulances and waiting to get out of an ambulance and into a hospital.”
ENDS
MEDIA CONTACT: Graham Mason | 0419 194 792
