Two hours into the ordeal Ms Brown decided to go home but had to return later that afternoon after her son began to show signs of severe dehydration. The 21-year-old had previously shown similar symptoms during a blood infection, leading Ms Brown to believe he could be in serious trouble.

“I was frustrated because I was like I can’t do anything to help my son, hearing that he is in agony and throwing up and I can’t get any medical care. How ridiculous is that?” she said.

“The nurses were extremely stressed out. They kept saying ‘I don’t know why we are taking any more patients. I don’t know why’. They were just so stressed, it was awful.”

After another couple of hours of waiting, they were given a bed and her son was put on a drip to keep his fluids up but Ms Brown said their experience was one she didn’t want to relive.

“Is it a matter of understaffing? Not enough beds? I don’t know what it is but the government needs to have a good hard look into it,” she said.

“I voted for Labor because I believe in their policies but they need to commit to fixing the public health department because I don’t want to have to go through what I did again.

“As soon as his blood work came back and they gave him medication for the pain and everything he felt so much better. So instead of waiting eight hours in excruciating pain and dehydrated, it could have been fixed in two hours.”

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Doctors have been sounding the alarm on WA’s struggling hospitals for months, with the state’s peak bodies representing doctors and nurses warning in December patients needing urgent care were being left to wait in ambulances for hours outside of overcrowded emergency departments.

Australian Nurses Federation boss Mark Olson said overflowing hospitals, patients being left in corridors, and nurses and midwives not being backfilled on sick leave had become the norm, adding the state’s health system was overcrowded to the worst level he had ever seen.

The crisis came to a head this week after it was revealed major hospitals in Perth had been in a code yellow.

But in an urgent press briefing Wednesday afternoon, Health Minister Roger Cook claimed the crisis in the health system was a result of a lack of GPs, greater demand on mental health services, difficulties in hiring staff, and playing catch-up with elective surgeries cancelled during the COVID-19 lockdowns.