The senior doctor who treated two critically ill patients within minutes of each other at a Sydney music festival has told an inquest the situation was chaotic but it did not overwhelm him.

A Melbourne woman, Diana Nguyen, 21, and a Sydney man, Joseph Pham, 23, died after taking on MDMA and being taken to a medical tent at the festival Defqon.1 in September 2018.

Sean Wing, who treated Pham for six minutes before handing control to others to treat Nguyen, told an inquest into their deaths he hadn’t been overwhelmed by the situation.

“For some people, it was overwhelming,” he told the NSW coroners court on Monday. “It was a chaotic environment but I don’t know it was overwhelming [for me].”

He was told that was surprising, given that he had previously said he’d never heard of two patients needing drug-induced intubation at a music festival and he had been faced with two such patients side by side.

“It was close to overwhelming and [afterwards] I felt overwhelmed,” Wing said. “We did what was necessary. I don’t know overwhelmed is a word I would use to describe it.”

A NSW ambulance intensive care paramedic, Timothy Mascorella, earlier told the inquest the medical staff had been overwhelmed by the number of patients and lack of medical equipment available. “I found the lack of leadership and crew resource management ... to be completely abhorrent,” he said.

Wing accepted there had been a lack of clarity during his handover of Pham’s care to a junior doctor and another paramedic but rejected it was due to his poor communication.

“I concede once I left the situation, there was a vacuum of leadership and those issues contributed to a sense of confusion about his care,” he said on Monday.

The inquest into six drug-related deaths at NSW music festivals continues.