HOSPITALS
Record waiting times, hospital beds cut and a massive shortage of health workers.
For the last 12 years, our health system and the people who work in it have been neglected by this government and Dominic Perrottet.
Dominic Perrottet is capping the wages of health workers below the cost of living, making it harder to retain workers.
To make matters worse, since 2016 they have downgraded ambulance stations across Sydney and cut 365 beds from NSW hospitals while all other states, except SA, increased their available beds.
We now have a chronic shortage of health workers, nurses and paramedics, and ambulance and emergency wait times are their longest on record.
People in NSW are now waiting longer than ever before to get an ambulance, to be treated in an emergency department and for elective surgeries.
The crisis in our regional Hospitals is so bad that the Minister for Regional Health recently admitted that “there will be situations when doctors are not at hospitals.”
Yet after all this, Perrottet’s Health Minister says claims that our hospital system is in crisis are “bullshit” and told health workers who raised concerns: “Why don’t you go and work in a third-world country?”
WE WILL RESUSCITATE OUR HEALTH SYSTEM
We have a plan to repair and renew our health system so that those who need care can get the care they need when they need it.
- Recruit and retain our health workers – and stop them leaving the profession.
- We’ll introduce minimum and enforceable safe staffing levels in our public hospitals, starting with Emergency Departments.
- We’ll hire 1,200 more nurses and midwives and recruit 500 more paramedics for rural and regional NSW.
And we’ll remove Dominic Perrottet’s cap on the wages of health workers so nurses, midwives, paramedics and everyone else who works in our hospitals can work with us to end the real wage cuts they’ve seen after 12 years of this Government.