The former Dundee High School head boy said he takes every opportunity to assist his senior colleagues making a rapid response to serious road crashes and other emergencies across Tayside. However, some things he just can’t get experience of in Scotland.

“Venomous snake bites and some of the more dangerous stuff I’ll be dealing with is just not indigenous,” said Dr Donald, conceding he might meet “the odd adder bite” in his current workplace.

Once out in Oz he will have to undertake a bit of training dangling on the end of a rope.

“The doctor is expected to winch from the helicopter,” said Dr Donald. “There is a fairly rigorous induction period that also involves escaping from a submerged helicopter wearing a blindfold.”

The Donald family — wife Pauline and daughters Maya (2) and four-and-a-half-months-old Sophia — head to Australia in January when Mike takes up a six-month attachment with helicopter rescue.

The team is based at Westmead Hospital, western Sydney, and covers a large proportion of New South Wales. With a population of between four and five million people, the sprawling city and suburbs of Sydney has 25% of the entire population of the vast continent.

Mike made clear it was not the Flying Doctor Service he was joining, which performs a completely different role in the isolated areas of Australia. He said viewers familiar with the television programme Trauma, which featured a medical team going by helicopter to emergencies all over London, would have an idea of what he was going to.

His interest is in pre-hospital emergency care, stabilising a patient and performing life-saving tasks at the scene of an emergency and en route to hospital. He joined the Dundee team not simply because he was a local lad but because of its reputation.

“The Ninewells department is definitely internationally-recognised as a centre of excellence to train in emergency medicine,” said Mike. “That was the reason I applied for this job. The trauma team that operates from here is one of the busiest teams in Scotland.”

Mike has been in the Ninewells department since May last year and will return following his attachment in Australia. He previously spent two years as an emergency medicine registrar in Sydney.

While it was a boyhood visit to RAF Leuchars where a family friend was a winchman that gave the young Mike a taste for helicopter rescue, it was his previous medical job in Australia that really stoked his interest in that field of medicine.

He explained that in his last job he was part of the resident team standing on the hospital roof to meet the helicopter when it landed with a casualty. In a few months he will be the doctor flying in with the casualty.

“I am attracted to working outside the hospital, outside of the safety of the big house, providing critical care at the roadside or on the side of a cliff,’’ he said.