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.
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