Thirty years experience, and stints in the Canberra Hospital emergency department, were not enough to prepare Dr Bernie Towler for the horrors of the Ebola breakout in West Africa.

"To be honest, I found myself crying at the Freetown airport as I left because I had never really allowed myself to do that before then," she said.

"Everything just flooded into my mind and I allowed myself to think about it."

After three days of clinical and cultural training in Deakin – as well as a short course in preparing a will – Dr Towler left Australia as headlines warned of 8000 deaths and rising in West Africa.

"As a doctor and a public health physician, I was following the outbreak but I became more interested once I realised it was a different kind of outbreak and it was spiralling out of control," she said.

Dr Towler arrived in Freetown on New Year's Eve and enjoyed a quick drink before beginning work at Aspen Medical's 50-bed treatment facility the next morning.

More than 148 people have been admitted the centre since it opened in late 2014 with the 30^th successful Ebola discharge recorded earlier this week.

Another 64 people have been discharged after being diagnosed with malaria, lassa fever and other conditions.

Each survivor at the centre has had his or her handprints painted onto the "wall of hope" at the centre – a reminder that a diagnosis does not always end in death.

In November, the Canberra-based company was contracted by the Australian government to run the treatment centre in Sierra Leone at a cost of up to $20 million until mid-2015.

But the task was grim. Close to 10,000 people have been killed by Ebola since the outbreak in late 2013 – with Australian nurses and doctors continuing to work in West Africa.

While Dr Towler said it was a privilege to help fight the epidemic, she had no qualms about describing the confrontational nature of the task.

"There were patients who arrived very distressed covered in blood and vomiting and they would be dying," she said.

"Sometimes all you could really do is give them morphine to ease their stress and sit with them."

Dr Towler said it was not uncommon for people to die in the "red zone" of the treatment centre overnight, with staff making sure families of the deceased were respectfully informed.

"You would often come across dead bodies and people clearly just about to die," she said.

"I remember walking past one man who was having a fit and knew he was about to die. You never got used to it, you just learn to manage."

There were, however, some joyous moments for staff, such as the recovery of two sisters in their early 20s who came to the centre with their babies.

"When we were able to tell them their results were negative they started dancing and singing around the wards," she said.

"There were tears in the eyes of doctors and staff because they survived and were able to pick up their children."

The nature of the work provided other challenges to medical staff at the treatment centre, with vigorous hygiene standards to restrict potential contamination.

"We were reading all the literature in the latest evidence-based approaches to managing patients, but we still didn't have some of the capabilities we have here in Australia," she said.

"Initially we only took people who came with a diagnosis in an ambulance, but after a couple of weeks we opened up a triage for people to self-present with symptoms.

"Some of the people who came didn't have a diagnosis but symptoms, and needed to be tested. Then we saw things like HIV, tuberculosis and, of course, malaria."

In her last week in Sierra Leone, an entire family presented to the treatment centre completely taken by the disease.

"For cultural reasons they didn't listen to the health messages urging people not to nurse family members at home," she said.

Dr Towler said the family had waited too long for treatment and isolation and had infected each other.

"The most distressing thing was watching an 18-month-old baby die over the duration of a week," she said.

"We tried every intervention we could, including injecting fluid into the bone, but unfortunately they just presented too late.

"It was very hard; we watched that child die alongside the 21-year-old mother, her aunt, uncles and relatives."

Dr Towler said the Australian Government deserved praise for committing to the fight against Ebola in West Africa for both humanitarian and strategic reasons.

"I am very glad to have been a part of it but it's not just about me – my family made big sacrifices for me to be over there," she said.

"Fighting Ebola over there is the best thing the world can do and that's about keeping all of us safe.

"It's one thing to reduce the number of cases but to get to zero cases is another thing altogether and a very difficult thing to do."