Episode 2 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...

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.

'Three-three-two, 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 fathers' day shopping trip ends in a terrible accident...

'We've been tasked to a four-year-old boy

'who's apparently got his arm trapped in an escalator

'at a shopping centre.'

..a driver tries to outrun the police in Perth...

I mean, we are not hanging about as we're going to catch him

and pull him over, and we've not caught up to him yet.

..and flight nurse Steve is scrambled to a 13-year-old girl

with a critical brain condition.

-How many fingers are there?

-Two.

The brain tissue is dying.

INDISTINCT RADIO CHATTER

It's Fathers' Day in Australia,

but for one family, a trip to the shops

has ended in a terrible accident.

Flying doctor Chris Cheeseman from Staffordshire

must rescue the young patient.

We've been tasked to a four-year-old boy

who's apparently got his arm trapped in an escalator

at a shopping centre.

And that arm is twisted and deformed.

Um...

so it could be quite a difficult extrication with a four-year-old.

Crewman John Legge's an RAF veteran

whose job it is to identify a landing site

as close as possible to the scene of the accident.

Are you guys happy to talk for a sec?

Yeah, go ahead.

OK, um...just at the moment,

I think the plan should be we'll land at that site,

you guys get picked up, and we'll just shut down in that...

In that area there, just waiting to hear back from you.

'Roger.'

The accident's happened at an out-of-town shopping centre.

I reckon that's a good spot to land as well, where they are.

Yes, looks good.

-You've got the...

-Yeah, and it's got the fence open as well.

-Yeah, there's a second copper in there waiting for us.

-Oh, yeah, OK.

Coming over the taller crease here or just a little bit left...

INDISTINCT RADIO CHATTER

250 to run, 80 below the crease, lines look good.

Ten to run. Five, four, three, two, one.

Volunteer rescue workers had to dismantle part of the escalator

to free little Jackson Keane.

His hand was crushed by the mechanism.

Hey, guys, how are ya?

Hey, mate, how are ya?

I'm Greg, and this is Chris.

This is young Jackson.

Jackson's being very brave, he's hardly even cried throughout.

Now he had his, er...

right hand sucked in through here.

When we arrived, obviously, a bit of a distressful scene.

Straight away we isolated the escalator,

started removing basic plastics around the patient's hand,

and then we disassembled part of the mechanisms to actually remove

the child's hand, and with a bit of patient manipulation,

we were successful in removing the child.

I hear you've been very, very brave, haven't you?

Good lad. Let's have a look at this, then.

Can you feel me touching here?

Dr Chris can see his four-year-old patient

has what could be a very serious injury.

Can you wiggle your fingers round?

Bit more? What about this one?

Oh, that's fabulous, isn't it?

I'd probably say he's sort of broken it around that region, hasn't he?

That sort of deformity, certainly got a bit of tenderness there.

So he's got a deformity here,

-so he's got a sort of fracture there, I'd say.

-Yeah.

-Quite a lot of swelling of the hand.

-Yeah.

-Fusions?

-Fusions OK, movements and sensations OK.

I think we should probably take him to Westmead, OK?

And it might turn out that he's had a lucky escape

and there's not been that much in the way of any injury, OK?

It's certainly fractured there, so that's going to need looking at.

Jackson slipped on the escalator and forget to let go of the rail.

He was trapped for 20 minutes.

Dad, can I have a look at your hand, mate?

Let me have a look at your hand, eh? How did you hurt your arm?

His dad was also hurt trying to rescue him.

He, too, has a hand injury.

But he doesn't care about his own pain.

So it's quite sore there, isn't it?

All right, listen, I think you need, you need to have treatment for this.

-OK?

-I think it'll be fine!

No, you might well have broken your hand there, OK, mate?

Dr Chris wants Dad to go to the hospital, too.

-I mean, you can go to the Westmead Adults down there...

-I'll...

..and get it X-rayed and things.

I'll just go wherever he's got to go.

Jackson's mum is trying to comfort him.

They were out buying a present for his dad.

-Ready?

-OK, yep, on yours, buddy.

-One, two, three...

Good work, buddy, eh?

Sleepy, aren't you, eh?

Jackson's remarkably calm.

Eh?

Dad's thanking his son's rescuers.

All good, mate. Get yourself sorted, OK?

You got your teddy?

Hey, good teddy!

You got two teddies!

Half an hour after the accident, and Jackson's on his way

to the Westmead Children's Hospital in Sydney.

Your dad's coming with us.

And he's just over there, cos I think he's hurt his hand as well.

Ever been on a helicopter before?

Wow! So it's going to be a good day for you, isn't it?

Go in a helicopter?

MACHINERY BLEEPS

'He was probably trapped for about 40 minutes, and during that time'

he was quite calm and hardly cried at all - very brave little boy.

The Careflight team has already alerted plastic surgeons,

who are awaiting Jackson's arrival.

He was right at the base of the escalator,

so I don't know how he managed to get his hand trapped there.

Were you just exploring it, were you?

Yeah, wondering what was going on inside.

There we go.

Budding engineer!

His dad may require surgery, too.

Got matching injuries. Father and son injuries.

Was your dad trying to rescue you, was he? Yeah.

So his dad's also probably fractured his hand,

and he'll need looking at

at the adult hospital next door to the children's hospital.

We're en route to you with a four-year-old child

who's crushed his right hand in an escalator.

Er...which was trapped for about 40 minutes.

He's got obvious fractures to his right hand,

but he's otherwise clinically stable.

It's an isolated injury.

Um...we're also conveying his father, who's got a...

also fractured his hand.

Obviously that'll be for the adults' hospital,

but we'll be bringing him initially to...

Um...to the children's to accompany the child.

INDISTINCT RADIO CHATTER

'Coming up.'

B...Y... Turning to the right.

Roger.

Dr Chris is now very much at home in Australia,

and some things are the same at home and abroad.

Treating injured children can be traumatic for medics,

no matter where the accident happens.

You...you just...maintain that professional detachment,

get on with the job in hand.

INDISTINCT RADIO CHATTER

That is enough ground speed there.

-OK, to the right.

-Roger.

-Oh, and we've got a porter!

-Yeah.

By coincidence, their freak accident has led to identical damage

to the same tiny bone in each of their hands.

Doctors discover that both Jackson and his dad

have been very fortunate.

They're sent home with little more than painkillers and bandages,

and soon regain full use of their hands.

Dad got his present the next day.

But for Dr Chris,

Fathers' Day ends on the beach with his own daughter.

Is that better?

Yep. Good.

'2006 is when I first arrived in Australia.'

Hit it?

'I was supposed to stay for 12 months,

'but I kind of forgot to go back home.'

Wow!

Look at that!

'Certainly the transition of medical practice'

between the UK and Australia is relatively easy.

Certainly Australian doctors and UK doctors interchange all the time.

We do get to see plenty of unusual cases

which you wouldn't see in the UK.

Particularly the envenomations - the snake bites, the spider bites.

Rare infectious diseases, er... that you wouldn't get in the UK as well.

Particularly in the Northern Territory,

you have patients who may have had their illness for many,

many weeks before they actually even manage to get to a remote clinic,

let alone to a decent-sized hospital.

Perth in Western Australia is one of the world's fastest-growing cities.

Two million people and rising,

attracted by high salaries and great weather.

But with them has come crime.

Rob Rixson spent seven years in the Met patrolling the streets of London,

dealing with armed robbers and knife crime.

When I worked for the Metropolitan Police I worked in Streatham,

in Lambeth, and we were very busy there. I was on a response team.

Colin Todd is a Scot who joined Western Australia Police

after a career in the Royal Navy.

'When I was growing up, you always kind of looked up to police officers.'

There isn't really anything else I would want to do in Australia.

Together, they keep the peace in the Northern Perth suburbs,

and they're equipped to deal with anything.

We carry a baton, er...

OC spray, Taser, handcuffs,

and a Glock.

TASER CRACKLES

Once you start carrying a firearm,

and you get your head round it, you...

you do police slightly differently.

Er...in regards to grabbing hold of people and being close to people.

You certainly keep a little bit more distance between yourselves.

Um...

got to think, yeah, most people come round to the idea pretty quickly.

I think most people are comfortable carrying a firearm.

Rob and Colin police a city

founded by criminals transported from Britain,

but it's actually a safer place than the UK

when it comes to most categories of crime.

It's 10 o'clock at night,

and a small red car has attracted Rob's attention.

Uh, just this car here that's taken off pretty quick up the road.

Just going to give him a traffic stop.

RADIO CHATTER

The driver of the car they've pulled over seems familiar.

I've met you before, eh? Yeah.

I wouldn't live and police the people that I live with, whereas here I do.

I police the suburbs I live in.

It's a routine stop.

The driver's identity checks out

and he's allowed to go, with a friendly warning about speed.

Remember built-up area is 50, OK, not 60.

I fairly regularly bump into people that I lock up.

In the supermarket or out in the park with my kids,

I will see people and there is never an issue there.

Back on patrol, Rob and Colin find two cars parked by the sand dunes.

Smoke is coming from the 4x4.

What's down here?

It's just the tail lights of a car, two cars.

That is not a full drive to them.

Want to go the red one and I'll go to the blue one?

OK, whose cannabis is it?

That's ours, mate.

-Ours? OK. Anything else in here or just that?

-That's it.

-OK, what about...

-There is a bong.

-You've got a bong by your feet?

-Yeah. I'll be honest with ya.

If you stop someone in a car in Streatham, the first thing

they'll say is, "I bought the car yesterday."

You stop a car here and probably the first thing they might say

to you would be, "I've got no driving licence,"

or something like that.

So, people are pretty quick to stick their hands up here

if they've done something wrong.

And probably the completely opposite

when I was working in Lambeth.

-Did yous come down with them?

-No, no, we didn't.

But what, to park next to another car. Do yous not usually try and... If you don't know them...

Oh, no, no. We know.

-Oh, you know them?

-We've been here before.

-Right, OK.

The two girls in the red hatchback appear to have nothing to hide.

Just sit tight, guys. All right?

-I'm just going to check your IDs out.

-Yeah, that's fine.

That can't be said for the four lads in the four-wheel drive.

-So you've made that yourself?

-No, I got it off of someone.

-It's still smoking, mate.

-Pardon?

It's still smoking.

-That's been sitting there for a while.

-Has it?

-Yeah.

-Is it home-made, though?

-I believe so, yeah.

Just jump out that side, guys, and come round and keep your hands where we can see 'em.

Just so we can give you a search.

-Has anybody got anything on them they want to tell us about?

-No.

Do you give consent to the search?

-Go for it.

-All right, bud.

Anything on you, you shouldn't have?

-No.

-No. Anything that can hurt me?

-No.

-No.

Nothing further is found,

but cannabis use is still illegal in Western Australia.

Have you got a top under here?

They'll escape a conviction, but instead

they will have to spend time at a compulsory drugs education centre.

Yeah, satisfied with these girls, if you want to...

Have you got their names, do you want to run them up or...?

Yeah, I've checked everybody.

I'm just going to get phone numbers.

The girls are free to go.

There's no evidence they were involved in anything illegal.

And so are the lads, if they can find someone who's fit to drive.

You're obviously driving tonight.

Are you safe to drive from here?

-You know you can't drive with cannabis in your system?

-Yeah.

-Yeah, you know?

-My house is literally, like, just down the road.

If you've been smoking cannabis you can't drive, OK? Can you?

-Me?

-Yeah.

-I can drive.

Well, you can't if you've been smoking cannabis.

So you'll have to...

One of the girls might have to drive your car down there, eh?

-Oh, I haven't had any.

-Oh, you haven't?

-No, I was just about to have one when you..

-OK. You got a licence?

-I sure do, yeah.

-OK, there you go. Problem solved.

More than half the residents in the suburbs

Rob and Colin police are British ex-pats.

But Perth is the world's most isolated city,

and the social problems caused by bored young people,

often missing the UK,

mean that this is unlikely to be the last drugs bust of the night.

-NEWS REPORTER:

-Cloudy at times today as we head for

top temperatures of 22 degrees on the coast and 25 in our west.

Fantastic. All right, everyone gets a name badge.

Presentation commencing.

So, Group R - Gillian Adams,

Blake Casby and Rod Wheatley.

-APPLAUSE

-One at a time.

Dr Sarah Coombes grew up in Yorkshire, trained in London,

and is now one of Australia's top flying doctors.

And Michael Lauria.

OK, if you can get your ambulance ready to go,

we're going to start packing up some stuff.

She's in charge of attracting new British recruits,

and helps supervise much of their training.

That's fine. But before they start pushing drugs you want to... Go, BP. What's... OK.

Obviously propofol would be a completely disastrous choice of drug.

But in an isolated burn patient, then, you know,

it's not what we would normally use but it's a fine drug to use.

Ambulance emergency. What town or suburb?

But she also takes her turn working in the control room,

which scrambles more than 30 air ambulances every day

to emergencies all over New South Wales.

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

Is he breathing?

RADIO CHATTER

The work we do here covers obviously a much bigger area -

four times the size of the UK - New South Wales.

So we'll do a clinical phone call,

find out what's wrong with the patient, give some ongoing

clinical advice to try and improve the patient

while we get a team to them.

And then we make the decision on the level of escort they need.

And the timeliness of that transfer.

And a check on whether they're going to the appropriate destination.

It's early morning at the Westmead Hospital in Sydney,

home of the children's air ambulance team.

It's about to transport a critically ill patient.

We're going to Orange, which is about 45-minute flight,

and we're going for a 13-year-old girl

who has come in in the last 24 hours.

The child's life could depend on this flight.

Because of the, you know, rarity of the condition,

I'm a bit worried that if she does keep on developing

neurological signs that the brain stem function may become an issue.

So I'll have a talk to the people in ICU.

Kate Smith has a rare form of encephalitis -

a swelling of the brain.

Her mum brought her to the local hospital.

She was so dizzy she could barely stand.

Then she had a seizure.

Time could be running out for Kate,

unless she's flown back to Sydney for specialist care.

Her life will be in the hands of flight nurse Steve Face,

a veteran of London's Great Ormond Street Hospital.

They can rapidly deteriorate.

She's currently stable,

but the potential to become unwell quite quickly.

To protect Kate, doctors at the Orange Base Hospital

haven't told her the seriousness of her condition.

-What's your favourite subject at school?

-Art.

Next year I do textiles and...

I can't remember what the other is.

Textiles and something else.

-How are you feeling at the moment?

-A lot better.

And how about funny vision?

SHE ANSWERS SLURRING HER WORDS

Can you close your eyes properly or does it feel difficult?

It feels weird.

Children's doctor Stephanie Boyd fears Kate is getting worse.

How many fingers are there?

Two.

SHE MUMBLES

-Just the finger.

-Two.

Two, two. Sorry I couldn't see.

It's hard, isn't it? Doesn't make you feel a bit sick, does it?

No, sorry, I just couldn't see then.

She was a little bit more sleepy and disorientated from what

they said earlier in the day, whereas she's interacting now.

Uh, you can see that she's definitely got some weakness

and you can see in her face that she's got a bit of weakness.

And she's quite alert

but some questions she's not quite responding as, you know,

appropriately or getting slightly mixed up with her responses.

And looking at her at the moment, I think that we'll just

transfer her as she is with all the things prepared that we said

just in case she does deteriorate.

Do you know why you're going to Sydney?

So you get to fly in a helicopter.

Well, they want to work out why sometimes it's hard for you

-to do things at the moment.

-Yeah.

-And it's a bit harder to talk.

That's sort of why things can be strange.

Yeah, so they're going to try and work that out for you.

-They've had a look at the pictures that we took of your brain.

-Yeah.

Um, and they think they have some idea what the problem might be.

They want to get you down there

so they can keep a close eye on you and do some more tests.

It's hard to reassure Kate's mum.

She is aware how serious her daughter's condition is.

What we're going to do now is speak to the neurology team

at the children's hospital in Westmead

and just discuss with them what our findings are.

Um, and there's a few questions we have just in that if they would

want to continue some of the medications that she's been on

and, if she did have further seizures,

how they would want us to manage that.

So we get all those things ready, generally drawn up, ready to go

just because it's very difficult to do once you're flying.

At least their patient's not fazed by her flight.

-Just sit here for a sec and just see how you feel.

-Yeah.

-Are you feeling dizzy?

-Just a little bit, yeah.

We'll just wait for the dizzy to go away a little bit.

SHE SLURS HER WORDS

-Still feeling dizzy?

-Yeah.

-Yeah.

So just take some long... nice, long deep breaths for me.

That's it.

Kate's flight from the rural town of Orange to Sydney is

a relatively short one, just 150 miles.

You feel like you're in the movie Harry Potter?

-She's in the MOOD for Harry Potter.

-Oh, in the mood.

Are you a bit of a fan, are you?

A bit? I absolutely love Harry Potter!

Every movie of him.

The Nets team carry with them

everything they need to keep patients alive.

A life-support unit is even mounted on Kate's stretcher.

Thank you ever so much for all your help.

Really appreciate it. Bye-bye.

The team's flying Kate direct to

specialists at the Westmead Children's Hospital in Sydney.

Nurse Steve and Dr Stephanie are constantly

monitoring Kate's condition.

It can be stressful, you know, when a child is unwell and you're

flying in a helicopter or in the back of an ambulance and you don't

have the backup that you would have on a ward or in an ED department.

But I think you train to do certain jobs.

You train to cope with the stressful situations.

You train to look after children when they're sick.

We've now handed over her to the care of

the children's hospital where they'll do further investigations

to try and just work out exactly what's going on with her.

So it's just a little bit of a walk along the corridor, OK?

Kate received intensive drug therapy over several days.

The swelling in her brain finally reduced

and she's now back home in the country.

The sprawling city of Perth covers 4,000 square miles.

Most households have several cars.

And expat policemen Rob and Colin spend a lot of time policing

the traffic that comes with living in a booming city.

So just now we are heading to Merriwa,

which is just a suburb just down here.

Someone's called in and they can hear a car hooning.

In the UK, they used to be called joyriders.

Down under, "hooning" is a major problem.

Rob's eagle eye spots a likely candidate.

Check this guy out first.

A station-wagon with four teenagers on board.

-This car?

-It's got a big dent in it, I reckon this is your hooner...

Despite Rob's advanced driving skills and one of the fastest

saloons on the road, he's not closing on the vehicle.

We were just driving out to that job, that 319,

and a car's passed us going the opposite direction.

It's got a big dent on the side of it.

So we're just going to have a look at it.

He's doing a fair speed as he's going through the suburbs.

I mean, we are not hanging about as we're going to catch him

and pull him over and we've not caught up to him yet.

Fortunately, he's behind this car, so that should slow him down.

The driver's not giving up but the road's a dead end -

it leads to the sand dunes that line the Perth seafront.

But the other driver has other ideas.

Has he got in dunes?

Good luck, mate.

Rob can't follow without writing off his patrol car.

-Where does that lead out?

-It doesn't, it goes to the beach.

Beach or... good luck driving on the beach.

They call in reinforcements.

We just had a car take off from us, gone into the dunes up in Jindalee.

We haven't got Polair, have we?

But there's no police helicopter available to

search for the car from above.

RADIO CHATTER

The vehicle has vanished.

He's obviously...he obviously knows the area.

He's deliberately came down here knowing that there's

access to the dunes there.

RADIO CHATTER

So we've got...the dogs come out.

And the dog handler's took his dog through the dunes

there to see if he could fine the car that took off from us.

He's took a decent walk in there but he's come across a car

but it's a different one so...

The dunes stretch for hundreds of miles. The police know

that they will have little chance of tracking the vehicle until daylight.

The tracks are pretty long in there and, without a helicopter,

it'd be a bit of a frustrating search to take it any further.

So, unfortunately today, we'll...

on this, we'll call it a day and just keep an eye out for it.

See if he comes out and we might see him out on the road.

The expat police don't always get their man

and the driver was never charged.