Director General Rescue Punjab Dr. Brig (r) Dr. Arshad Zia on Saturday said Punjab emergency services rescued 780,888 emergency victims during 623,371 rescue operations in 2015.
He said Rawalpindi Rescue 1122 dealt 22,971 emergencies calls and rescued 24,562 victims in different emergencies.
The 22,971 emergency calls responded to in Rawalpindi during 2015, included 9,539 road traffic accidents, 9,874 medical emergencies, 753 fire incidents, 875 crime calls, 13 drowning case, 13 building collapse incidents, 28 explosions/bomb blast and 1,876 were special rescue operations and miscellaneous emergencies.
Presiding over a meeting of rescue officers at Rescue 1122 Headquarters, he reviewed performance of Punjab Emergency Service during 2015 and announced that Rescue 1122 shall mark 2016 as a Year of Safety, said a news release issued here on Saturday.
In this regard, several programmes for prevention of emergencies shall be launched including School Safety Programme and establishment of Community Emergency Response Teams in all towns and tehsils of Punjab.
Furthermore, these teams shall be trained for Disaster Response and Community Based Risk Reduction for prevention of emergencies, he added. The meeting was attended by all heads of wings.
The review showed that the service maintained its average response time of seven minutes and standard in all Districts of Punjab.
The Provincial Monitoring Cell (PMC) briefed the DG Rescue Punjab that 227,390 road traffic accidents took place across the Punjab in 2015 whereas 2,011,20 RTAs were reported in 2014 with increase of 6.13 per cent.
Similarly, 295,323 fire incidents were reported in all 36 Districts of Punjab in 2015 whereas some 11,138 cases of fires were reported in 2014 with increase of 427 cases.
They managed 295,323 medical emergencies in 2015, whereas the Service responded to 274,134 medical cases in 2014 with increase of 3.72 percent.
Also, the Punjab Emergency Service responded to 21,747 calls related to crime last year, as compared to 24,703 in 2014 with increase of 6.37 percent.
Total 173 explosions were reported in 2015 in Punjab as compared to only 172 cases during 2014. The team also responded to 1,106 cases of drowning, 831 building collapses and 65,236 miscellaneous incidents.
The PMC further briefed that road traffic accidents increased by 9.8 percent in Bahawalpur; 7 percent in Rawalpindi, 5 percent in Lahore, 3.9 percent in Gujranwala, 3.24 percent in Multan and 2.82 percent in Faisalabad.
DG Rescue Punjab Dr. Arshad Zia said that during the last 11 years, Rescue 1122 has emerged as a successful model of emergency services delivery.
Recently, on proposal of director general Rescue 1122, chief minister Punjab has approved the establishment of dedicated urban search and rescue teams of Rescue 1122 in nine divisional headquarters of Punjab to deal with complex and challenging building collapse emergencies.
Dr. Arshad Zia further said that Rescue 1122 has ensured provision of basic right to timely emergency care without any discrimination and now the service shall undertake evidence based research on the number and nature of emergencies, to recommend measures for prevention of emergencies.
