Personal information that Ambulance Tasmania employees thought they were sharing anonymously as part of a workplace culture survey was ultimately handed over to the organisation's bosses, Right to Information documents show.
Last month the ABC revealed an extraordinary number of Ambulance Tasmania staff reported they were suffering from mental health conditions, and some were self-medicating with drugs and alcohol, after a "resilience scan" collected anonymous feedback from the workforce last year.
A third-party company, Frontline Mind, was contracted to undertake the "resilience scan", asking employees to share experiences from their work for Ambulance Tasmania, which they were told would be anonymous.
However, Right to Information documents obtained by the ABC indicate the entire data set collected by Frontline Mind was later forwarded to Ambulance Tasmania bosses.
That's despite the fact it included personal information that could potentially identify employees who participated in the "anonymous" survey.
An email from a Frontline Mind employee to Ambulance Tasmania boss Joe Acker states that, "After a bit of trickery I've managed to format the full data set as attached".
"Hopefully, this works for the purposes required — I think it's important to note that this could be taken out of context quite easily so I advise some discretion as to who has access to this," the Frontline Mind employee wrote.
A series of fully redacted pages follow. The pages have been redacted on the basis that they contain personal information, and information collected in confidence.
Ambulance Tasmania chief executive Joe Acker said the resilience scan was conducted anonymously, and that his organisation could not control whether an individual chose to put identifying details in the experience they chose to share.
"For this reason, the confidentiality frame extends to the executive team who are working with an agreed 'Chatham House Rule' when looking at the stories and patterns," Mr Acker said.
Mr Acker said the idea of the anonymous scan was to encourage people to share honest responses.
"The Resilience Scan is designed to look at narratives at scale to track for themes and patterns, not individual, specific stories," he said.
Frontline Mind chief operating officer Dorian Broomhall said the scan did not collect any personal information and employees were asked not to identify others directly in their stories.
He also said the use of the "Chatham House Rule" ensured the stories were kept in confidence by that group of people.
"We do not share the unedited stories outside the agency, as they can be taken out of context, although representative examples are used in the form of a dashboard that is available to all staff," he said.
"Connecting leaders with the insights from the frontline of their business is the normal process of how we run a resilience scan, having run this with dozens of agencies here in Tasmania and elsewhere."
Labor leader Rebecca White said the government should explain how the information-sharing occurred.
"Any time we ask employees to participate in a process to understand what's happening in the culture of an organisation — and, in this instance, it demonstrated significant problems in the culture of Ambulance Tasmania — not only do they have to act to fix that, they [also] need to make sure that information, when it was shared, is dealt with appropriately," Ms White said.
It was ordered following a series of worrying staff testimonies given during the inquest into paramedic Damian Crump, who took his own life using drugs he had stolen from the ambulance service's supply store in 2016.
