WA budget’s $3bn boost for health system

The McGowan government will spend $3.1bn rebuilding and expanding Western Australia’s strained hospitals.

WA Premier Mark McGowan. Picture: Jackson Flindell

The McGowan government will spend $3.1bn rebuilding and expanding Western Australia’s strained hospitals while pouring resources into trying to avoid what Premier Mark McGowan acknowledges would be “a massive patient load if we do have an outbreak (of Covid-19) here”.

While the Labor government intends to create 646 extra hospital beds, hire 100 additional doctors and 500 additional nurses, Mr McGowan said his focus remained on keeping Covid-19 out of WA.

“The main thing is to do everything we can to avoid a NSW-style outbreak,” Mr McGowan said.

WA’s health system is showing signs that it is past capacity despite no community transmission of Covid-19 since March.

The only cases of Covid-19 in WA are Australians in hotel quarantine who have arrived home with the virus.

Yet the state’s hospitals earlier this month were forced to cancel hundreds of elective surgeries due to pressures in the health system. Ambulance ramping – the time patients spend in ambulances waiting for hospital beds to become available – has also soared from an average of about 1000 hours a month four years ago to more than 6500 hours in August.

The pressure on a system with no Covid-19 patients was alarming to some of the state’s most experienced doctors.

Spending on the WA health system announced on Thursday includes $960m over four years for health and hospital services. This will deliver an extra $100m to hospital emergency departments and their staff budgets.

Separately, the McGowan government will spend $487,000 on Covid-19 vaccinations and hotel quarantine facilities.

This is part of urgent efforts to lift WA’s Covid-19 vaccination rates, which lag behind the national average. Only about 34 per cent of eligible West Australians are double vaccinated.

In some regions of the state, the Covid-19 vaccine rates are significantly lower among Aboriginal people. While some remote Aboriginal communities have achieved Covid-19 vaccination rates above 80 per cent, the Kimberley Aboriginal Medical Service has encountered hesitancy due to dangerous misinformation.

The service has been prompted to launch a series of short videos on social media providing facts about Covid-19 vaccination.

The most money for health announced in the budget – $3.1bn – was for health infrastructure. The government will build a $1.8bn women’s and babies’ hospital in Perth to replace King Edward Memorial Hospital built in 1916.

Another $1.3bn will be spent on improving and expanding hospitals on the southern and northern fringes of Perth, in the remote northern goldfields town of Laverton, in the satellite cities of Mandurah and Bunbury south of Perth, in the midwest port of Geraldton, and in the iron ore towns of Tom Price and Newman.

In Tom Price, mining giant Rio Tinto is paying for half the rebuild of the local hospital.

Those hospital upgrades will create 314 extra beds, 109 of them for mental health patients.

A further 332 additional hospital beds will be created as part of the overall $1.9bn health budget announced by Health Minister Roger Cook on Thursday.

WA increased its graduate nurse intake from 700 a year to 1100 in 2021. The state health system will take on 1200 graduate nurses in 2022.

Mr McGowan said that to recruit 500 new nurses, WA would recruit locally, from interstate and from overseas.