PESHAWAR, May 11: Health and development workers on Thursday appealed to the government to impart training to people in disaster and crisis management and help them to cope with natural calamities in future.

“The October 8 earthquake killed 73,000 people and made thousands of families homeless in the quake zone of the country. In view of the devastation caused by the earthquake, we need to put in place a disaster management strategy to cope with such situations in future,” said Faryal Gauhar, ambassador of the UNFPA.

Speaking at a certificate distribution ceremony held at the Alpha Omega Institute (AOI), Ms Gohar said that last year’s earthquake had caused countless problems that continue to haunt dwellers of the affected areas.

She praised the institute for organising training courses and imparting knowledge about how to deal with health crises caused by natural calamities. She said that the country urgently required the services of trained female health workers.

Other speakers representing Unicef, ICRC, GTZ and the WHO stressed the need for drawing lessons from the experiences and hardships in the post-quake scenario and implementing disaster preparedness plans.

They pointed out that the quake had exposed the ineptness of the existing state-run institutions. The government, they said, is in no position to tackle the situation emanating from the tragedy.

Moreover, they said, it wasn’t just a particular area in which the government had failed but on all fronts. “Such utter failure had given birth to a chaotic situation,” they added. “People remained stuck in the debris and kept crying for help that was not forthcoming,” they said. “If the country had a viable disaster management plan, thousands of people could have been saved.”

They also stressed the need for acquiring state-of-the-art machinery required for disaster preparedness and crisis management.

Nazlee Sardar, chief executive of the AOI, said her institute had taken the initiative to establish a disaster preparedness and crises management training centre, under its faculty of development studies. The training centre has designed short-term certificate courses in health crises in a large population, disaster preparedness and crises management, as well as environmental concerns in disaster management.

She said that the institute conducted health crises in large population certificate course from May 3 to 10. According to her, the institute had designed modules on health, emergencies and planning, apart from developing modules on human rights and international humanitarian law.

Certificates were later distributed among the 25 participants of the training, including executive district officers (EDOs), health staff from quake-hit districts, casualty medical officers from Khyber Teaching Hospital, Lady Reading Hospital and Hayatabad Medical Complex and other health professionals.