Surgeon says no silver bullet for ramping as hours triple
A leading surgeon says SA could continue to experience ramping for years to come, saying it “is not a problem that can be solved by a political campaign”.
A nationwide report card on ambulance ramping has found that it “continues to be a critical symptom of the logjam in our public hospitals” and “a significant and growing challenge directly affecting the safety and wellbeing of patients, paramedics, and the broader health system”.
The Australian Medical Association’s (AMA) Ambulance Ramping Report Card 2026 found that ramping hours in South Australia had more than tripled since 2019-2020, when ramping hours were about 15,000, to 49,000 in 2024-25.
AMA SA president associate professor Peter Subramaniam said he was not surprised to see how many hours were lost to ramping, saying it “is not a problem that can be solved by a political campaign or an election campaign”.
Subramaniam believed that an ageing population with more complex chronic diseases, as well as the difficulty of accessing community care, were contributing to high ramping hours.
He said it was hard to compare different states as they collate ramping data differently, but that SA’s results were nonetheless “not good”.
“We really think that treating the cause is as important as treating the queue,” he said.
“Ramping isn’t something that will be fixed by a single silver bullet, but it does take intentional investment in community care.
“Ramping needs us to systematically and intelligently look at what is driving ramping, and the solutions are going to be multi-year solutions, but we need to start somewhere.”
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Subramaniam called for investments to be made in community care, including in mental health, aged care and palliative care, to keep people out of hospitals in the first place.
“There are patients who wait on the ramp that deteriorate, and the deterioration is not visible to the system because they’re in the back of an ambulance,” he said.
“There are numerous examples of people coming in with chest infections that need early treatment with antibiotics, who wait some hours before they get an intravenous line put in, and antibiotics started.
“People who present with abdominal pain whose cause is unknown, and then you do a CT scan, and you discover that there’s a surgical reason and they need urgent surgery.”
While Subramaniam welcomed the state government’s record investment in health, he reckoned the money could be more effectively spent, saying that simply throwing money at the system was not a solution.
“We can’t do the same thing and expect a different result when the evidence is suggesting that we need to start doing things differently,” he said.
“I think we’re going to be living with this problem unless we take some deliberate steps to address it.”
According to SA Health’s latest ramping data, 3958 hours were lost to ramping in May 2026, down from a high of 5866 hours in June 2025.
In comparison, in July 2017, 328 hours were lost to ramping.
The hospital with the worst results in May 2026 was Flinders Medical Centre, which saw 1190 hours of ramping, while the Royal Adelaide Hospital racked up 971 hours.
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Lyell McEwin Hospital tallied 962 hours of ramping in May, The Queen Elizabeth Hospital 368 hours, Modbury Hospital 278 hours, Noarlunga Hospital 160 hours and the Women’s and Children’s Hospital 28 hours.
In Budget Estimates on Friday, Health Minister Blair Boyer admitted that Labor had not fulfilled its 2022 election commitment to “end ramping”.
“I am still committed to doing absolutely everything that we can do to reduce ramping by as much as we can … [but] we did not meet the commitment we made in 2022, despite our investment and the recommendation to which you refer around ramping being a reality that all modern healthcare systems face,” he said in reference to a Coroner’s report into ambulance ramping.
The Deputy State Coroner handed down 18 recommendations to the state government in June aimed at improving patient safety and system flow, focusing on ambulance ramping, triage procedures and hospital capacity.
It followed the deaths of 76-year-old Anna Vincenza Panella in April 2019, 89-year-old Bernard Anthony Skeffington in September 2021, and Graham Henry Jessett in March 2022. All three were ramped before dying.
Health Minister Blair Boyer told InDaily that despite a sharp rise in ED presentations, ambulance transfers and triple zero calls over the past decade, the latest ramping data showed signs of improvement.
For example, May’s ramping figures were 831 hours or 17 per cent down from the previous year, while the biggest improvement was at the Central Adelaide Local Health Network, where ramping has reduced from 2518 hours in May 2025 to 1339 hours this year.
“Year to date, we have seen a 5.7 per cent reduction in overall ramping hours lost compared with the same period last year, resulting in 1,137 fewer hours lost,” he said.
“It reinforces the Malinauskas Labor Government’s record investment in the state’s public health system, with $11 billion allocated in the 2026/27 State Budget.”
Boyer said this included adding hundreds of extra beds and thousands of health staff, heavily investing in the SA ambulance service, delivering 24/7 pharmacies and committing millions towards a Greater Northern Adelaide Hospital at Concordia.
However, Boyer said there were currently 425 elderly South Australians stuck in SA Health facilities, saying “one of the ongoing factors putting pressure on emergency departments is the number of aged care patients waiting for a Federal Government-funded aged care bed”.
Shadow Health Minister Jack Batty claimed that South Australia had experienced 50 consecutive months of the worst ramping on record since Labor came to power, but that “the new health minister wants to make the excuse that ‘no one in the world’ has fixed it”.
“Instead of excuses, we need a different approach that gets patients the care they need, including better access to GPs and primary healthcare so fewer people end up in our overcrowded emergency departments,” he told InDaily.
“Labor’s so-called investment in health is nothing more than a record of failure.”
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