The National Insurance Commission (NIC) Wednesday donated some personal protection equipment (PPEs) to the Upper West Regional police command to help enhance their service delivery to people in the region.
The items, valued at about GH₵35,000.00, included hand gloves, reflective jackets, and body bags.
Handing over the items, Professor Justice Ofori, Commissioner of Insurance at the NIC, said the police service went through a lot of challenges in their service delivery on daily basis.
“Insurance is insurance because of the support we get from the police. Insurance companies don’t have the power of arrest so anything we do we rely heavily on the police to do our job and we want to maintain this marriage that has existed over the years.
We have been working with the Ghana police service insurance was introduced in Ghana because even though we have compulsory insurance like third-party insurance, the insurance company or the commission cannot arrest and so we do our exercise with the police, this is just to cement the existing relationship we have with them”, he explained.
Prof. Ofori indicated that some major challenges that came up during their engagement with the actors in the insurance industry were the under-cutting of insurance to get more clients as well as some insurance companies trying to pull down the others.
He, however, urged the insurance companies to desist from those acts and to support each other in their work.
The Commissioner said there had been improvement in motor insurance since the introduction of the Motor Insurance Database (MID).
He said the intervention led to the registration of 800,000 vehicles in the country and “As we speak we have about 1.6 million vehicles registered because of the MID and the ability of the police to authenticate stickers on vehicles instantly using the short code *920*57#.”
Prof. Ofori observed that the introduction of the instant authentication of vehicle insurance had built confidence in the insurance and added urged travellers to authenticate vehicle insurance before even buying their ticket.
Assistant Superintendent of Police (ASP) Mr Paul Boabeng Donkor, the Upper West Regional Commander of the Motor Traffic and Transport Department (MTTD), expressed gratitude to the NIC for the gesture and said it will help improve their service delivery to the public.
These items have come at the right time, the time that we are in dying need of these items. At times when we are called to an accident scene we have to improvise something like a glove with a polythene bag before we will be able to handle the accident victim”, he explained.