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.
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