Abstract

Until recent past, people of the Pakistan were deprived of their basic human right of availability of timely pre-hospital emergency care. There were 95% chances that an injured person dying on the road, shall not get an ambulance in time. Similarly, emergency services like fire, rescue and disaster response teams were virtually non-existent in the country.

Rescue 1122 was initially launched as an ambulance service from Lahore in 2004. Successively, the service was not only extended to all 36 districts of the Province Punjab, but also crossed the provincial boundaries. Presently, it has developed into a comprehensive system of emergency care and safety promotion that is offering ambulance, fire, rescue, water rescue, disaster emergency response teams and safer community programme to over 80 Million inhabitants of Pakistan. So far, the service has rescued over 1.4 million victims of various emergencies.

Today, Rescue 1122 has become a largest humanitarian organisation in the country, but the job has not been completed yet, because the mission of the service is to develop an efficient system of emergency care and build safer communities. Therefore, we look forward with the vision Saving Lives: Changing Minds, and every effort is going on to work for injury prevention and safety promotion. Injury prevention research and emergency data is regularly presented to policy makers at local and national levels to formulate an evidence based strategies to bring down the rate of various emergencies. These initiatives are providing basis for the establishment of safer communities in Pakistan.