A POLICE officer has admitted he failed to react properly to an emergency call from the father of a Scots teenager dying of heat stroke on an Australian trek.

Ewan Williamson, from Largs, Ayrshire, collapsed with heat stroke and exhaustion while hiking along a gorge with his father Gordon in December 2012. He was visiting his father, who had moved to Western Australia.

An inquest into the 14-year-old's death has already heard that two police officers arrived around an hour after the call but paramedics did not appear for another 30 minutes.

Mr Williamson, who made the emergency call, earlier told the inquest the officer,Senior Constable John Diviney, had struggled to understand his accent.

Giving evidence, Mr Diviney admitted he had difficulty interpreting Mr Williamson. However, he said he did understand that it was a medical emergency and should have organised for an ambulance to be called to the scene as a priority.

“I got tunnel vision,” he said. “My mind was focused on the location.”

Mr Diviney, who has been a police officer for 30 years, said he had written down the notes of the phone call, before inputting them into a computer system. This resulted in a five-minute delay between the end of the emergency call and the job being logged.

He was a "two-finger" typist who had undergone no data entry training before being put on to the rota as an emergency call handler, The West Australian reported.

After the death of Ewan, a pupil at Largs Academy, Mr Diviney was handed a management notice which said his treatment of the emergency call was not good enough.

Acting Superintendent Gary Cunningham said it should have been clear, during the seven-minute call, that there was an emergency.

He said that since the teenager’s death, improvements had been made to police communications, including better sound quality in headsets used by phone operators.

The inquest continues.