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

Senior Constable John Diviney took the call from Gordon Williamson, whose son Ewan collapsed with heat stroke and exhaustion while hiking along a gorge in the remote Cape Range National Park in December 2012.

Giving evidence at an inquest into the 14-year-old’s death, Mr Diviney admitted he had difficulty understanding Mr Williamson’s Scottish accent during the seven-minute conversation.

He said, however, that 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.

Ewan, a pupil at Largs Academy, was visiting his father, who had emigrated from Ayrshire to Australia.

He had begun to feel faint just a short time into the walk and Mr Diviney had initially given him water and taken shelter in a cave before returning to the track, where they became disorientated in temperatures of up to 48C.

His father dialled the emergency services to raise the alarm but the call was marked as a “priority-three” job.

After the death, Mr Diviney was handed a notice saying his treatment of the emergency call was not good enough.

The inquest has heard that two police officers arrived about an hour after the call but paramedics did not appear for another 
30 minutes.

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.

Speaking about the phone call with Mr Diviney, Mr Williamson earlier told the inquest: “He didn’t make a lot of effort to try to understand. It’s seven minutes – I think that’s bloody ridiculous.”

The inquest continues.