A total of 58 Emergency Medical Technicians have graduated from the Ghana National Fire Service Training School to augment government effort at reducing deaths and permanent injuries at accidents sites. The graduation ceremony was the result of six months of robust training and tuition in subjects, including Physiology and Anatomy of the body. The Director of Administration of the Ministry of Health, Madam Salamatu Abdul Salah, noted the training of EMTs was in line with government efforts to ensure that complete, accurate and timely information was available to all Ghanaians for them to make the right choices about safe health services. This, she said, was because public response to the injured and the sick in the emergency situation was inadequate and often worsened the patients’ plight. She cited the examples of the tragic death of prominent people in society in addition to those who died in the stadium disaster on May 9, 2001 and said they exposed the country’s lack of preparedness to handle emergencies and disasters. She quoted statistics released by the Ghana National Road and Safety Commission in its 2005 annual report which revealed that four people were killed daily in road traffic accidents while 60 per cent of those killed annually were in the active age group of 18-55 years to buttress her point. Government, she said, took the challenge to establish an ambulance service with the capacity to respond promptly and effectively attend to all emergency situations to prevent unnecessary deaths. The ambulance service was part of a larger response that would include enforcement of speed limits, drinking laws, use of seat belts, better road engineering with support from other related sectors, she said. To date, the ambulance service had achieved among other things, the training and deployment of the first three batches of 187 EMTs to 21 locations, including two control rooms of the Fire Service. Source: GNA