A terminally ill woman has died during an overnight electrical outage that disrupted Ambulance Tasmania's communications centre.
An electrical fault in a major switchboard inside Hobart's state communications centre caused reduced power to Ambulance Tasmania's communications centre between 12.40am and 3.30am Sunday, when a back-up system kicked in.
But for up to 35 minutes, calls came in but all other IT and communications functions were knocked out, Ambulance Tasmania chief executive officer Dominic Morgan said.
Mr Morgan said this forced some ambulance staff to relocate to the Tasmania Fire Service communications centre, within the same building.
Two calls were received in that time - one non-life threatening and one for a terminally ill woman in cardiac arrest.
He said ambulance dispatch may have been delayed one to two minutes as details of both calls were taken and passed to the TFS communications centre, which then sent paramedics.
Mr Morgan said Ambulance Tasmania staff gave CPR and medical advice to the woman's husband and paramedics arrived within 10 minutes.
"Unfortunately, the patient was already terminally ill and receiving palliative care at home and unfortunately passed away," Mr Morgan told reporters.
"I think it's important to just clarify that we believe at this stage that this is a patient that succumbed to her condition, which was a normal and expected passing for this person."
Mr Morgan said he had since advised the woman's husband of the outage, and has launched an investigation.
This will include technical expertise from the NSW Ambulance Service, which Mr Morgan said had experienced a similar outage, and consultation with staff and the Health and Community Sector Union.
"I think the community should be reassured that we are taking this absolutely seriously," he said.
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