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.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here