00:00This is a rare glimpse behind the scenes of an unusual medical emergency.
00:06We're at Concord Hospital where frontline healthcare workers are responding to a highly infectious disease case.
00:12Now thankfully the person behind this door is not a real patient and this isn't a real emergency.
00:17This is a drill.
00:19The exercise started this morning when the woman arrived in the emergency room here
00:23reporting symptoms consistent with potentially deadly disease, Ebola.
00:28The patient is a 38 year old female who's been travelling overseas to Sierra Leone.
00:34They've now been back in Australia and they're now presenting with an illness.
00:40So fever, aches, pains, low blood pressure, bleeding gums and it's enough to trigger a response for a high consequence infectious disease.
00:50A code red emergency was declared and the patient was quarantined.
00:54She's been undergoing testing.
00:56While a meeting was held in the hospital's incident control room, that's where key decision makers from multiple government agencies planned the next steps.
01:04Paramedics and doctors are now transferring her in a protective capsule to the biocontainment unit at Westmead Hospital.
01:11This is specially designed to treat patients with high risk infectious diseases.
01:16While the risk of an Ebola infection in Australia is very low, experts say this exercise is particularly important at the moment because there is a current outbreak in Central Africa.
01:25Australia hasn't had any Ebola or Ebola like illnesses imported to Australia yet, but cases have occurred imported to America, but also into Europe as well.
01:35So we must be prepared for the event that it occurs here.
01:38While it's hoped an event like this will never happen, the aim of this exercise is to make sure emergency workers are ready if it does.
Be the first to comment