The figures from the Productivity Commission's annual report were taken from the 12 months to June last year, before state budget cuts were even announced.

``You'd only need to give it six months, we were already behind and we'll be the worst state or territory in the country in all indicators of health,'' Australian Nursing Federation Tasmanian secretary Neroli Ellis said yesterday.

In response to the report, released last week, the state government acknowledged there were ``still many challenges associated with Tasmania's decentralised and ageing population, workforce availability and other pressures''.

``Reform of our health and human services should be an ongoing process of continuous improvement.''

But opposition health spokesman Jeremy Rockliff said the outlook for health in Tasmania was ``extremely bleak''.

``These statistics in time won't just be embarrassing, they'll be devastating,'' Mr Rockliff said.

The majority of Tasmania's public hospital patients waiting for elective surgery in 2010-11 waited 359 days, with 9.6 per cent waiting more than a year, according to the report.

That compared to figures as low as 148 days in Queensland, with 1.3 per cent waiting more than 12 months.

It was also an increase in Tasmania from the average 332-day wait in 2009-10, with 8.7 per cent waiting more than a year.

The only area of Australia that had a worse waiting record was the ACT.

Emergency department waiting times at Tasmanian public hospitals scored badly as well, with 38 per cent of patients not seen in an appropriate amount of time.

The two territories were the only areas of the country that had a worse result, with 42 per cent not seen on time.

``We're already not achieving acceptable waiting times pre any of these budget cuts and now we've closed 108 acute beds and five theatre suites,'' Mrs Ellis said.

``Each theatre suite does about 50 elective cases per week so that's 250 electives each week that we're not doing.''

The state also had the highest number of people deferring medical treatment due to cost and the highest, after the two territories, numbers deferring visits to the doctor for the same reason.

The number of patients putting off a visit to the doctor rose sharply right across Australia in 2010-11.

In 2009, Tasmania had the second lowest percentage of people putting off buying prescribed medicines due to cost, but those figures rose to the highest in the country in just one year.