A review is underway into disruptions to the Ambulance Tasmania dispatch system after the second outage in 24 hours.
Premier Will Hodgman said specialists were being brought in from Melbourne to provide a second battery unit back-up in response to recent power incidents.
On Friday night, a dispatch system had to be rebooted, leaving staff to manually record cases for more than an hour.
Earlier in the day a circuit failure affected two phone lines and disconnected a triple-0 call.
Ambulance Tasmania said operations were not adversely affected during the incidents.
But the Health and Community Services Union’s Tim Jacobson said the issue on Friday night made it difficult to respond to cases.
“The issues as I understand it became extraordinarily difficult during that period because there were a significant number of cases that came [in] at the time and that resulted in delays in dispatching some cases during that period,” he said.
“In addition to that, the communications centre [staff] at that point weren’t able to basically receive status responses from ambulances in order to determine which ambulances had cleared from scenes and which ambulances were available.
Last month, Tasmania’s ambulance communications centre suffered a statewide breakdown for three hours.
The head of Ambulance Tasmania Dominic Morgan said in a statement the need for the replacement power supply systems had been determined after after the July incident and the equipment had been fully installed by Saturday afternoon.
“It was essential that these components were replaced to minimise ongoing power outage issues, which have the potential to impact Ambulance Tasmania’s operations.,” he said.
Mr Jacobson said the system’s failures highlighted technological problems that need to be addressed.
System woes concerning, says Premier
The Premier said the issues would undoubtedly cause concerns for Tasmanians.
“There is currently underway a review, an audit, of the circumstances last night, but I’m advised there were no delays,” Mr Hodgman said.
“I’m very pleased to have heard direct from the relevant authorities that not only are these matters being addressed, but they are putting in place processes to ensure that they don’t happen again.
“Independent experts are indeed already assessing the systems that we have in place.
“The review that they’ve undertaken is being acted upon, and that includes getting independent assessment of their processes and their systems so that should also provide people with a greater degree of comfort.”
State Opposition Leader Bryan Green is calling for a bipartisan approach to improving the ambulance service’s power and technology systems.
“We probably need to take a bipartisan approach, if there’s capital required, well it should be spent,” he said.
“We need to understand immediately what is the problem here, we cannot have a situation where our ambulance service is not functioning properly because people’s lives are at risk.”