Dr Rhys Ross-Browne was just home after school drop-off, when an alert sounded on his smartphone that would send him scrambling back out the door to help save a stranger’s life.

It wasn’t the local hospital but from an app the emergency physician had registered with which sends alerts to volunteers to incidents requiring CPR.

“I was on my day off, having a coffee, checking a few emails,” Dr Ross-Browne recalls. “It was for someone about a kilometre away, right near the kids’ school, so I accepted the alert, and jumped in the car and got down there.”

The ED doctor based at Campbelltown Hospital in Sydney says it was a pretty nervous drive.