The Health Minister is being called out for refusing to label the current ambulance ramping rates a crisis – when conditions are worse now than when he was in opposition.

Three major hospitals have had to turn away patients at emergency departments in recent days after being declared a code yellow.

Roger Cook claims the health system isn’t in a crisis and labelled it “business as usual”.

Emergency medicine representative from Australian Medical Association in WA, David Mountain told 6PR’s Liam Bartlett the system is constantly struggling.

“Patients die increasingly frequently when they come into overcrowded hospitals,” he said.

“There is a 10 per cent increase in mortality for patients who come into those environments.

“So the fact we are running our hospitals routinely overcrowded, means that this is happening all the time.

“So that’s hundreds and hundreds of deaths a year happening in our health system from a preventable cause.”

The AMA claim the Health Minister is ignoring pleas for help from the sector, and is in “complete denial” about the severity of the problem.

“You can’t deal with a problem if you won’t accept you have a problem in the first place,” he said.

“The most goring thing about yesterday was to be told that code-yellow is business as usual, code yellow means you have an internal disaster in your hospital, it’s never business as usual.”

Click play to hear the full interview.

(Photo: Getty Images.)