Ambulance Tasmania fully met just 23 of 138 national safety and quality actions in a mock readiness assessment, documents released under right to information show.
The Australian Council on Healthcare Standards assessed the service against national safety and quality standards last year, finding it met about 17% of the actions in full.
The national standards are used to accredit health services and the assessment tested how ready Ambulance Tasmania was to meet them.
The assessment also found delays in responding to recommendations from coroners and from reviews of the service’s most serious incidents.
It also identified gaps in risk management, in identifying Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander patients and in keeping policies up to date.
The report said addressing the issues would take a “substantial investment of time (potentially 1-3 years) and resources”.
Greens health spokesperson Cecily Rosol said the report showed a lack of resources was behind the results.
“We know that Ambulance Tasmania staff are working hard and doing their very best to provide safe care to Tasmanians, but they’re not being given the resources to make sure that it’s meeting accreditation standards,” she said.
Rosol acknowledged the assessment was voluntary and not mandatory accreditation.
She said the state budget showed spending on Ambulance Tasmania falling between this financial year and next.
“[The state government] cannot cut funding to Ambulance Tasmania over the next year,” she said.
Labor MLC and shadow health minister Sarah Lovell said the results put the government’s health savings under further scrutiny.
A government spokesperson said the voluntary assessment was undertaken “to deliver continuous improvement”.
“We are investing more than $776 million into Ambulance Tasmania and continuing to recruit more paramedics,” the spokesperson said.
