Episode 1 Emergency Rescue Down Under

They're the Brits who race to the rescue down under...

'Multiple patients critical.'

..everyday heroes saving lives...

'12 miles to run.'

..battling fires...

Come out now! It's too late.

It can be extremely dangerous.

..and fighting crime.

Put your arm down.

Police! Open the door!

From the big city to the outback...

Our policing district is bigger than the whole of the UK.

..from the bush...

'He's been crushed between one of those dingo diggers and a ute.'

..to Bondi Beach.

'The search continues for a British tourist who hasn't been seen

'since he went for a swim.'

You never quite know what you're in for or what's going to happen.

'3-3-2, mate, on the head in.'

Very high impact. He's really quite critically injured.

Brits on blue lights under blue skies.

Today down under - a medical emergency in the bush

turns into a wildfire rescue mission.

Let's see if we can put it out, eh?

We're doing some ad hoc firefighting at this point.

British policeman Kurt comes across some ugly customers in the outback.

Lawrence of Arabia. That is the biggest I've ever seen.

Are you with us, Lewis?

And there's a scramble to rescue a sick baby.

He's been unwell for about five days.

They're at the upper limit of what they can cope with at this hospital.

In Australia's busiest emergency control room

there's a desperate call for help.

OK, right now is he awake? OK, is he breathing normally?

It comes from a remote wilderness 70 miles west of Sydney.

We've got reports from police in the Blue Mountains

of a party of three males in their 20s

who've been canyoning yesterday.

Lost or supposedly disorientated overnight.

One of them's reportedly a diabetic.

So they're concerned about his welfare

and his ability to walk out today.

British flying doctor Gillian Adams is preparing for a tricky rescue.

I've just got some overnight and outdoor weather gear

so I've got some warm clothes, some sun screen and hat and sunglasses

and a cereal bar, just in case we're there

for a bit longer than we think.

So the police helicopter were unable to extricate them

or insert anybody to check them out.

So they've dropped some water into them.

So I guess they won't be dehydrated.

The distances are always a lot greater in Australia.

The weather can be more extreme.

So it can be certainly a lot hotter during the day

and can then get quite cold during the night.

Aeromedic on patrol.

They're heading into one of Australia's

most hostile environments.

There's a lot more dangerous creatures

and critters out there that we need to be aware of.

And some of the terrain can be quite difficult to access and dangerous.

After a night lost in deep bush with no medication,

the diabetic man could be in real danger.

If he'd taken his insulin the day that they set out

and then been exerting himself all day and then not had the opportunity

to eat any food, and I believe they only had some sweets with them,

his blood sugars could have become precariously low.

That's what we call a hypo, or hypoglycaemia.

At 34 degrees.

'34.'

36 decimal five.

'36 decimal five.'

You get a cascade of symptoms starting

with feeling a little bit unwell,

maybe a bit light-headed, a bit shaky, a bit nauseous.

Then in extreme circumstances these people can become

comatosed and die if this isn't detected and treated appropriately.

ENGINE DROWNS OUT SPEECH

'We can give you our mapping system, if that helps

'out for the precise location.'

Satellite navigation helps the team fly straight to three men

lost in 7,000 square miles of wilderness.

So the decision was for Garth to winch down

and do an initial assessment of the boys and the area to decide

if it was necessary for myself to come down too.

MUFFLED RADIO COMMUNICATION

But Garth finds himself in a new and more urgent emergency.

Whoa! See if we can put that fire out.

A bushfire has broken out.

Unless they're quick, it will spread.

We'll do what we can, you might want to set down somewhere.

This is going to take a few minutes, I think,

if we're going to be successful at all.

Right, what do you think?

Yeah, got our work cut out here pretty quick.

Let's see if we can put it out, eh?

Oh, thanks. We're doing some ad hoc firefighting at this point.

Our decision was to move the helicopter,

fly away slightly whilst the boys

and the paramedic on the ground made some attempt to extinguish the fire.

If you guys come down here again, it's going to whip it

into a big fire. Who'd want to be a firey?

It was spreading and at this point Garth made the decision that

all four of them needed to be winched back into the helicopter

because of the unpredictability of how fast and how far

that fire was going to spread.

Oh, that's really going.

No, we're not going to get anywhere.

We're best to get out of here.

Rescuer and casualties are trapped between a wildfire

and a steep cliff.

Only the chopper can save them.

Australia's Red Desert is among the least populated areas on earth.

An empty wilderness, that's home only to a hardy community of

gold prospectors and a few thousand Aboriginal people.

And there's our community in the middle of the desert.

Police constable Kurt Weedon, who once patrolled Kent,

keeps the peace here and it's no small task.

It's a vast place, really large.

Our policing district would be bigger than the whole of the UK

and you just cannot get your head round that concept,

that sort of a handful of police officers cover an area so big.

Kurt's on duty in the police station at Warakurna,

a thousand mile drive from Perth, the nearest city.

Hello, sarge, it's Kurt again.

Can you chuck us onto CAD? It would be so much quicker.

The country policeman's job is a demanding one in Western Australia.

Officers are expected to react to emergencies on duty and off.

We work a 40 hour week but anything that happens after that,

then whatever time of the day or night it is,

we're the only ones here.

So we're the only ones for 200km.

So it's got to be us that goes to deal with it.

So, out of bed and we'll be down there and see what happens.

And tonight there's trouble in the local town -

a domestic incident has got out of hand.

By the sound of it, someone's been hit in the head with an axe

but that's the only information we got.

So until we get there, we don't know the extent of the damage.

So we won't know until we get down to the clinic

-and find out what's happened.

-Ready to go.

With so few officers and so many square miles to cover,

dealing with any incident like this demands sensitivity and diplomacy.

This could be a long night for Kurt.

What do you want? A coffee? Sugar? Vegemite? Toast?

A male's been arrested. We've now got him in custody.

All right, mate. We've just had a phone call in from the court

that they're going to call us at 10.15 and then they'll be ready to

proceed with the court.

That's all done by way of video link.

It's a courtroom but, as you can see, it doubles up as a gym.

So this is the courtroom.

That's all the video-link equipment. So there's a dial-in system.

You dial in there, the magistrate comes up on the screen

and all the cameras that go through to Kalgoorlie.

Come on, mate. It's this way.

The hearing lasts just five minutes.

That's you finished, mate.

Have yourself a seat in there, mate.

The ruling is, Kurt's suspect isn't getting bail.

Cos of how remote the community is

and how small the community is, there's nowhere safe for him to go.

The community is concerned for their welfare

because of his behaviour and they believe that

he may continue to be violent towards members of the community.

And also for his welfare, because there's

a possibility of retributions for the alleged assault.

So because the community is so small and so remote,

there's nowhere safe for him to go.

So really the only option, and the safest option for everybody,

is for him to be flown and taken away from the community

and reside in custody in Kalgoorlie until his hearing comes up.

What we have to do is, we have to get them to Warburton,

so generally we'll do a halfway meet with our colleagues from Warburton.

Want to put your flip-flops on?

Good man. Jump in here for us.

Ready? Right in. Excellent. Mind your feet.

The journey their prisoner is starting out on is equivalent

to travelling from Lands' End to John o' Groats, ending in a cell.

High in the Blue Mountains, three lost walkers are in trouble.

It's getting hot, guys, let's stop what you can...

If we bring them in again, we'll blaze the fire.

Trapped between a bushfire and a sheer cliff, their lives

are in the hands of air ambulance winchman Garth Thompson.

We'll put you in a seat.

When you look at the helicopter you'll go in the door,

you'll go into a seat opposite at the rear, OK?

Yeah, we'll put you in a seatbelt.

It's the downwash that's the big issue.

Yeah, so get around there. Just keep in mind the fire.

ENGINE DROWNS OUT SPEECH

So this job quickly turned from a potential medical emergency

into more of a rescue situation, which is a huge team effort

from the crew and the pilot and the paramedic.

ENGINE DROWNS OUT SPEECH

As the boys were brought individually into the helicopter,

after a rapid assessment it became clear they were all quite well.

We got the thumbs up because talking is always difficult

with the communications and the helmets and things.

I think they were just relieved to be removed

from that fire at that area and off to safety.

We were low on fuel so the pilot decided to land on a nearby property

and drop the boys off.

It's been a very lucky escape.

The fires burn for nine days

before they're finally put out by bush firefighters.

The casualties, Shane Timmermans and Thomas Kotzur,

know they owe their lives to the air ambulance team.

Absolute gods.

So the people that came to rescue us, the air ambulance,

very professional. They got the job done really quickly.

Shane was the final one to come out

and by the time Shane had got lifted out,

the chopper was starting to get fairly full of smoke.

Obviously if we were there for a little bit longer, like waiting,

and say there wasn't a chopper there to lift us straight out, it would

be quite scary as there was a fire, like, bushfire right next to us.

It just goes to show that sometimes the information you're given

initially is not reflective of the job you end up doing.

We thought this case would be a simple rescue of a diabetic patient

and it turned into a bushfire rescue.

So we never know what's going to happen.

The British flying doctors work hard

and play hard.

A few days after the rescue

and Dr Gillian is unwinding with her friends in a Sydney swimming club.

Certainly work can be stressful.

The hours can be long, some of the cases can be quite difficult

and you're winching onto cliffs in the mountains,

you can be rescuing people out of the water.

The lifestyle in England is great on a good day

but in Australia we have lots more good days, I guess,

so there's a lot more opportunity to get out and about.

After nine years and two children born in Australia,

she has no plans to return to the NHS.

We fancied a bit of a change after training

and working for a few years in Birmingham,

looked around for some jobs,

I got offered a job at Manly Hospital,

looked like a nice place to be,

so we came over, thinking we'd be here for about a year,

and, yeah, nine and a half years later, we're still living in Manley

and our family are still wondering when we're coming home.

-RADIO:

-'WSFM.

-WSFM 101.7. Hello there. It's Jonesy and Amanda.

'What a nice looking day.

'Mostly sunny, 25 degrees in the city, 30 in the west. It is 7.23...'

When it comes to health, Australia is among the best

and the worst places to grow up.

In the big cities, health care for kids is as good as it gets,

but in some remote areas, child death rates are as high

as in countries like Sri Lanka or Lebanon.

PHONE RINGS

NETS coordination. Jenna speaking.

It's the NETS team's job to even the odds.

So you want the patient to go to ICU not the emergency department.

These medics are specially trained to get sick children

to specialist care in Sydney as quickly as possible.

-Are you with us, Lewis?

-Yes, sir.

-Excellent.

It's the start of another shift for Steve Face, formerly of London's

Great Ormond Street Hospital and now a paediatric flight nurse.

We've been tasked to Liverpool, which is a hospital about 25km

from Sydney to pick up a boy with bronchiolitis.

He's been unwell for about five days.

He's been getting a little bit worse

and they're at the upper limit of what they can cope with

at this hospital so we've been asked to go and assess the child

and probably move him to one of the children's hospitals in Sydney.

Today's case reminds him of his job back home.

Bronchiolitis is a lung condition most common in European winters.

It leaves its young victims struggling for breath

and it can be fatal.

So we can't take him on high flow.

So we can see what his breathing's like when we get there

and maybe just trial him turning him down to low flow.

The team's patient is in a local hospital

in the sprawling Sydney suburbs.

We'll need to put him on C-pap.

I'll set the C-pap up either way

so we've got the C-pap if we need it on the way.

-And maybe just be able to take him on low flow.

-Yeah.

It's worth giving him a suction.

The NETS team travels with its own mini intensive care unit.

This winter's been unusually chilly for Australia

and there's been a surge in cases like this.

BOY COUGHS

Little Yusuf Malik is ten months old.

A virus is causing inflammation in the tiny tubes in his lungs.

He's been ill for three days and his doctors are concerned.

So initially he was OK, he was just on some low flow oxygen.

But deteriorated in the evening and was put on high flow.

So he, he went up to 1.5 litres per kilo.

And then he didn't really improve initially

for about three hours or so. So he was running off 80 to 90

and then it went down to about 60, 70.

Despite antibiotics and oxygen therapy,

Yusuf's showing little sign of improvement.

His dad, Irfan, is a GP.

How's he looking like now compared to earlier in the night?

Better, but he deteriorated overnight.

So is he looking slightly better than earlier or...?

Slightly better, yes, but not really.

Is that since they put this system blowing the air through his nose?

-It was 68...

-It didn't really affect it.

-Yeah.

-OK.

All right, little man, you're not going to like this.

Most bronchiolitis cases are minor and respond quickly to treatment.

Yusuf's infection is neither.

Steve and his colleagues will be keeping a close eye

on their patient through the 20-mile journey.

Yogesh, can I get you to hold his...? So if I can get...

Yeah, head and arms would be great. All right, mate, here we go.

OK, OK, bubba.

The team's using suction

to try and ease the congestion in Yusuf's lungs.

We need ketamine, ketamine.

All done. I know, it's not nice, is it?

We did suction. Usually these kids, they have a nasal blockage

so whenever we are giving flow it doesn't go down that much

and it doesn't help lungs to expand.

So we have to do the deep suction

and we got some amount of suction secretions -

not much but he will be better with this.

Children often deteriorate quickly, without warning,

and in the back of an ambulance that can be difficult to deal with.

So I'll just get some fluids and bits made up.

I've got the C-pap bits and pieces if we need to

increase our support and we're just getting a ketamine infusion made up

in case we need to give him some sedation so that he tolerates that.

OK.

YUSUF COUGHS

So, Lewis, if you can stick that on the oxygen there for me.

That's it. And if you stay close so he knows you're there

and we'll get him...

-Can you get through there, Lewis?

-I know I can do it.

Such a smooth driver.

For Steve and Dr Khachane, the journey through the Sydney jams will

be every bit as challenging as many of their longer transfers by air.

MUFFLED RADIO MESSAGE

In the big city traffic,

specialist help is just as far away if something goes wrong.

MUFFLED RADIO MESSAGE

MUFFLED RADIO MESSAGE

Sydney Children's Hospital is a welcome sight for the team.

It's Australia's Great Ormond St,

and Yusuf will soon be in the best possible hands.

His condition slowly improves

and a week after his emergency transfer

he goes home with his relieved mum and dad.

In Western Australia,

British constable Kurt Weedon and his Aussie sergeant, James Parker,

are on a two-hour drive through the outback

to meet colleagues from the next station,

just so their prisoner can reach a jail cell.

So from here to Warburton,

you've got this dirt track road, as you can see.

That's about two and a half hours' drive.

Then he'll be put on the plane to Kalgoorlie,

which is about an hour and a half?

-Yeah, about that.

-About that. An hour and a half on the plane then.

But on a busy week, if we're travelling between the communities,

it wouldn't be unusual for us to do 1,000km in a week.

Distances here are huge compared with Kurt's old beat back in Kent.

The longest we'd have to travel there would be

kind of Dartford to Swanley, which is probably a 15-minute journey.

The majority of the jobs would be maximum of five miles away.

HE YAWNS

Fellow officers from the station at Warburton are a welcome sight.

-How you going? You all right?

-How you doing, mate? How you doing?

-Nice one.

-Kurt, is it?

-Yeah. Nathan. Hello, Nathan.

-And...?

-Stu.

-Hello, Stu.

-We'll do the paperwork.

-Yeah, come on. Let's do it.

Kurt's not the only Brit out here.

One of the prisoner's new escorts is a UK exile too.

There's one I need to keep. Yeah, I just need this one, yeah.

There you go, mate.

All right, thanks, Stu.

Oh, is he in? Cheers.

-He's in, all done.

-All done. Nice one.

112km we've got and they've got about the same - 100, 120?

-About 120.

-120 to go. So, yeah, got a bit of lunch of on the road

cos don't think I'm going to get anything else to eat otherwise.

ENGINE STARTS

Can't miss your dinner for anyone.

FORK SCRAPES IN TIN

Few people or animals are adapted to surviving out here.

Temperatures can reach 40 Celsius or more in summer.

But there are exceptions.

Lawrence of Arabia.

Camels were brought to the outback by Victorian engineers laying

railways and telegraph wires.

Now their descendants run free.

It's certainly different to being back home.

A few pictures there.

SHUTTER CLICKS

These animals have multiplied so successfully,

they're often rounded up and sold to the Middle East.

I suppose it makes doing a 12-hour shift a little bit worthwhile

when you see something like this.

Look at the big one.

That one's gotta be the daddy.

Look at the size of it.

Pretty impressive.

That is a big, big bunch of camels.

That is the biggest I've ever seen.

That was a real sight to behold.

I didn't even have my own phone,

otherwise I would've taken a couple of photos.

Even Sir David Attenborough might have done that, eh?

-AS DAVID ATTENBOROUGH:

-Here we have the native Australian camel.

Kurt's souvenir pictures won't be going back home to the UK.

For all its isolation, he loves his work out here,

and Australia is where he intends to stay.

Every year, 5.3 million Aussies take off on internal flights

and some will spend five hours in the air

without even leaving the country.

But no-one wants Brit Juanita Ameghino as a flight attendant.

Four, five, two and two.

She's a nurse, caring for sick passengers on the planes

that are the ambulances of the outback.

-Steve, this is Pamela.

-Hello, Pamela.

-Hi, Steve.

Making room.

Pamela is 74 and recovering from surgery for cancer.

OK, Pamela, going up in the world.

You'll be able to see over the rooftops of Mascot.

That sunrise has gone now. There was a beautiful sunrise earlier.

Many patients face long journeys for complex surgery in Australia

and Juanita and her colleagues fly more than 1,000 home each year.

That's it.

Thanks, Steve.

ENGINES POWER UP

There we go. Glad to be going home, yeah?

You're looking well. Are you feeling well now?

Apart from about the week post-op

when the painkillers were making me feel a bit woozy...

-Oh, yeah. yeah.

-..I felt remarkably well the whole time.

MUFFLED RADIO MESSAGE

There'll be no refreshments on this flight.

Juanita's duties include monitoring Pamela's condition.

Some patients require oxygen or extra painkillers.

It's been quite serious. She was admitted in June

and I know that she's got extensive cancer in her bowel

and it's spread to her kidneys and her ovaries and her uterus.

But she's had all of that removed. She's a 74-year-old lady

so it's a big operation for a little, old lady

but she's coping very well.

I've just spoken to her - she's comfortable,

she's happy that she's had the surgery,

and she's coping remarkably well.

This is a short flight by Aussie standards.

We're coming from Metropolitan Sydney here

and we're coming all the way down the south coast,

through Wollongong, through Ulladulla,

and all the way down to Merimbula here,

which you're looking at six or seven hours by road,

and we're just going to nip straight down there in 40 minutes.

I'm just keeping an eye on her saturations just to make sure

that she doesn't deoxygenate with the altitude changes.

I also just checked her blood pressure to make sure that she's

not affected too much by the G-force and I'm checking her pulse.

-ALTIMETER:

-'50, 40, 30, 20, 10.'

ALTIMETER BUZZES

-On terra firma.

-Absolutely. On terra firma.

Pamela's on her way to a local hospital,

where she'll continue her recovery before eventually being allowed home.

OK, Pamela, just moving you.

It's great, isn't it, yeah?

Well, you can always travel by this way now.

You never have to climb those stairs again.

That was pretty good. It's a beaut little aircraft.

It's been part of a life-changing journey.

She's been really fit and well. She's had a good recovery.

She was fine during the flight and her observations are just normal.

And she's done very well. She didn't require oxygen during the flight.

And she's coming home to beautiful Bega.

I might see you when I'm visiting. I've got friends down here.

That's why I know it's a long way to drive down.

See you.

Juanita rarely sees her patients again...

..but Pamela might just be an exception.