The state government will deploy artificial intelligence to help clear bed block at Royal Perth Hospital during the 2026 winter flu season, Health Minister Meredith Hammat has revealed.
Hammat announced the 12-month $700,000 pilot at a Business News breakfast on Wednesday morning as new statistics revealed WA’s emergency departments were the slowest in the nation for patients to be seen.
Health Minister Meredith Hammat.Credit: Hamish Hastie
The AI program will use existing real-time data around bed usage at RPH and will schedule tasks for patients like medical imaging, laboratory tests, medication packs and discharge summaries.
“The dashboard will also allow us to see what’s available at any given time, and that is really the important part of that, is understanding, in real time, where beds are available in our health system, so that we can make good decisions about how we use the capacity that we have,” Hammat said.
“It’s an important pilot … in the future, AI will impact on every industry right across Western Australia.
“The appropriate and safe use of it in our health system is something we need to turn our minds to, and this is a small step towards it.”
The pilot comes after a horror winter for the Cook government’s hospital system which saw record rates of hospital ramping.
The government blamed the flu season for those issues after more than 30,000 cases were recorded, the most since records began.
Just how under-pressure WA’s emergency departments are was laid bare in new figures from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare figures released on Wednesday.
Despite just a 0.7 per cent increase in ED presentations to 1.02 million people, wait times were the worst in the country.
The median wait time in WA was 44 minutes – the longest in the country and seven minutes ahead of the next worst on the list, the Northern Territory, at 37 minutes.
When removing the 10 per cent of patients who were seen the quickest due to the severity of their condition, 90 per cent of presentations waited 229 minutes at WA emergency departments.
This is 50 minutes worse than Tasmania, which recorded the next worse time at 179 minutes. Queensland was the quickest at an average wait time of 78 minutes.
Just 46 per cent of West Australians were seen on time at an emergency department, the same as Tasmania.
Hammat attributed the poor result to increasing complexity in patients arriving at WA’s emergency departments.
“Of course, those wait times are a concern, but we’re seeing more complexity in terms of the health care issues people have in the community,” she said.
“So it is taking longer for people to get the treatment that they need when they present to our hospitals.”
Hammat said the $1.5 billion health fund announced this year, which includes a $500 million maintenance fund as well as upgrades to RPH, a new Peel Health Campus and purchasing Mount Lawley Hospital, would make inroads into the problems faced by the hospital system.
Opposition health spokeswoman Libby Mettam said the emergency department figures were “appalling”, given WA was the wealthiest state in the country.
“This government has no one else to blame but themselves, given they have been in power for 9 years and have enjoyed the largest boom our state has ever seen,” she said.
“They were dragged to the table on the most recent announcements on additional funding for maintenance, but these funds were not announced during the election nor in the most recent budget, and there is serious alarm about this government’s ability to roll out what it is required when it comes to health.”
Mettam also questioned the government’s ability to roll out the new AI tool.
“After all, we are one of the only states in the nation still not to have an electronic management records system which could significantly improve the health outcomes and the ability for our health system to effectively improve health outcomes,” she said.
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