SA Ambulance Employees Association general secretary Leah Watkins, whose union ran a sustained media campaign against the Marshall Liberal Government at the 2022 state election, said today she was “less confident” that the Malinauskas Government could fix ramping by the 2026 state election.

Watkins said that an 83-year-old woman arrived by ambulance at the Royal Adelaide Hospital at 8pm last night but did not get a bed until 8.30am this morning, spending around 12 and a half hours on the ramp due to hospital bed block.

Watkins also said there were seven ambulance crews ramped at the RAH overnight with mental health patients.

Meanwhile, priority two ambulance callouts – requiring a response within 16 minutes – were being met with an average wait time of around 30 to 40 minutes, Watkins said.

The Malinauskas Government was elected in March 2022 on a pledge to build hundreds of new hospital beds and hire hundreds more clinicians and ambulance officers to “fix the ramping crisis”.

Ambulance Employees Association paramedics wrote protest messages on ambulances during a high-profile campaign against the Marshall Government during Labor’s 2022 state election campaign.

Labor has since committed $7.1 billion in health spending and is vowing to bring 330 new hospital beds online by the end of next year.

Asked on ABC Radio Adelaide today if she was confident that the Malinauskas Government would end ramping over the next two years, Watkins said: “I’m less confident now than I was two years ago.”

“I felt like two years ago we had four years to come at this and for the election commitments to start having an impact,” she said.

“I do understand the vast majority of beds that they have committed to have not come online yet, so I do hold out some hope that there are hundreds of beds that need to come online.”

Watkins later told InDaily that the number of ambulances ramped yesterday and the duration for which they were ramped “had reached levels that I’d never previously heard about”.

She said the 330 extra beds coming online by the end of next year is “very encouraging” but “in the meantime, we are in an absolute crisis right now”.

“I am concerned that given the increasing workload year on year, by the time those beds come online they will have a limited impact in reducing ramping,” Watkins said.

“Everything that they have done up until now has been absolutely needed, and it is a real shame that this type of investment and forward planning wasn’t done years before.

“The fact that they started when they did is fantastic – better late than never – but we’re just in a world of pain in the meantime and it’s impacting patients on the ramp and patients in the community.”

SA Health’s dashboard showed at 10am this morning the average wait time to be assessed by an emergency department clinician at the RAH was more than six hours.

Ambulance response times for priority one and two callouts – requiring an ambulance within eight and 16 minutes respectively – have improved during Labor’s time in office.

The percentage of priority one callouts met on time reached 71.1 per cent in June 2024, up from around 50 per cent in the early months of the Malinauskas Government. Priority two callouts have also improved from the low 30s to 62.5 per cent.

But these metrics still have a long way to go if they are to meet the benchmarks Labor set before the last election.

Premier Peter Malinauskas promised before the election to lift the percentage of priority two callouts that arrive on time to 85 per cent. At a press conference on Feburary 25, 2022, the then-Opposition leader said this would take four years to achieve.

Hours lost to ramping have also trended upwards during Labor’s time in office, increasing from 2638 hours in April 2022 to 4773 hours in May 2024.

The most recent figures for June saw ramping hours decrease to 3798 hours amid a ban on non-urgent elective surgeries to free up capacity in the hospital system.

Health Minister Chris Picton said at any one time there were about 200 patients in South Australia’s hospitals waiting to be discharged into an aged care or NDIS-supported facility.

“That means that there’s 200 beds that are taken up by somebody else in the system or because they’re waiting for that federal government support,” Picton told ABC Radio Adelaide.

Picton said the 330 additional beds coming online between now and the end of next year is “the equivalent of a whole new QEH hospital coming into the system”.

“It takes time to plan and build additional hospital beds, and when we came to office, there wasn’t any plans on the table for these hospital beds to be built,” he said, adding that the state government was pulling “every possible lever that we can” to fix the problem.

“All of those construction works are now underway, and we’re going to see a big uplift – probably the biggest uplift that we’ve seen in a generation – in terms of the additional hospital beds coming online by the end of next year.”