Libby Mettam says Labor’s claim it is expanding hospital capacity is ‘empty boast’ as bed figures revealed

Labor’s claim it is expanding hospital capacity has been exposed as an “empty boast,” according to Libby Mettam, after new figures revealed there are only an average of 118 more beds available than seven years ago. The revelation came on Thursday following a special investigation by The West Australian that exposed the deteriorating state of one of WA’s major hospitals, Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital, and after record rates of ambulance ramping in July. The Shadow Health Minister seized on figures compiled by the Department of Health’s BedState system that identified an average of 3899 “daily active beds” were available for patients in metropolitan hospitals in July 2018, while the Government recently told Parliament there were 4017 “daily active beds” in May. That amounts to an average daily increase of 17 beds per year — or three per cent — while the State’s population surged 15 per cent with more than 400,000 new arrivals. Shadow Health Minister Libby Mettam said it contradicts repeated claims by the Premier and Ministers that bed numbers have been boosted by more than 800 since 2021. In Parliament in June, the Government tabled a list of 929 “total delivered infrastructure beds” including contracted beds in private hospitals. A State Government spokeswoman said bed capacity and available bed data is “not comparable” and, during Question Time on Thursday, Health Minister Meredith Hammat denied misleading Parliament. She partly blamed “maintenance” for the discrepancy. “The figures you’re referring to, I believe, are what would be considered an accessible or available bed,” Ms Hammat said. “It is important to understand that the number of available beds in the system will change over the course of the day. It changes every day, because not every bed is available on every occasion. “Reasons that it might change, for example, are because the patient’s been discharged and that room needs to be cleaned, it may be that there’s some maintenance required. “So that is why the more accurate method is to count the number of beds that have been added through infrastructure upgrades. And so that’s what we’ll be doing, that’s the number we’ve shared.” Government MPs rallied to Ms Hammat’s defence, shouting “you’ve got your numbers wrong again” to Ms Mettam, as the Opposition benches fired back: “They’re your numbers.” “This sort of deception is just what we have come to expect from the Cook Government,” the Shadow Health Minister said. “Meredith Hammat needs to be the brave one, admit our hospitals are sick and be the one to fix them with additional, critical investment. And she needs to do it now.” Former Australian Medical Association WA president Andrew Miller called the Government’s figures “a bit of tricky accounting” last week, after a record rate of ambulance ramping revealed the extent of delays in Perth’s hospitals. “Some of them are beds that have been mothballed previously and then reopened,” Dr Miller said. “It’s pretty obvious to everybody who drives past an emergency department and sees all these ambulances waiting that they haven’t opened enough.”