Australia’s High Commissioner to Ghana, William Williams, has inaugurated a prosthetics and orthotics school building at the Orthopedic Training Centre (OTC) in Nsawam, Ghana. The project was funded by Australia’s Direct Aid Program to help communities alleviate human hardship and poverty.
The new facilities include classrooms for training of O&P technical assistants and a fully equipped technology building to provide O&P services for adults and children.
“With the completion of the classroom block, the OTC will now be able to train Ghanaians in orthotic and prosthetic technology and in future it hopes to become a long-distance training institute affiliated to the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, [PMB Kumasi, Ghana],” Williams told Ghana News Agency.
Ghana’s Deputy Minister of Health, Rojo Mettle Nunoo, said that the OTC has been the leading provider of O&P services for Ghanaians as well as for West African sub-regions such as Nigeria, Ivory Coast, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Benin, Togo, Burkina Faso, and Niger. “We hope this training institute will be a center of excellence and be engaged in training as well as research and development and in prosthetic, orthotic and general rehabilitation of persons with disability,” he was quoted as saying.