CR4HC Resilience Strategies: Extreme Heat
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Impact of Extreme Heat on Healthcare Organizations
Extreme heat impacts healthcare organizations both directly and indirectly. An example of a direct impact is the increased burden on facility air conditioning systems. Examples of indirect impacts include (1) an increased risk of power outages when excessive demand overburdens the local electrical grid, (2) electrical lines drooping, sparking, or no longer transmitting electricity, (3) patient surge from both heat-related and all-cause morbidity, (4) community members using the facility as an ad hoc cooling center, and (5) the risk of supply chain disruption if transportation infrastructure is impacted by the heat.
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Important Considerations
Health Effects of Heat: Heat cramps, heat exhaustion, heatstroke, exacerbation of chronic medical conditions such as cardiovascular disease and diabetes, pregnancy complications, and mental and behavioral health symptoms such as increased interpersonal violence and impaired attention and cognition
Populations at Risk: Older adults (especially those who live alone), infants and children, pregnant women, low-income populations, people with housing instability and homelessness, people with substance use disorder, people with chronic conditions (such as cardiovascular, pulmonary, and renal disease), people on medications that increase heat sensitivity, outdoor workers, outdoor athletes
Risks to Facility Operations: Storage of medications and clinical supplies, supply chain disruption, patient surge, prolonged power outage
Infrastructure Risk: Compromised transportation and building infrastructure, rolling blackouts/power loss, inefficient utilities
Elements of a Climate Resilient Healthcare Organization: Extreme Heat
Climate resilience complements core emergency management activities. Vulnerability assessments that include climate resilience consider the implications of the changing climate on a healthcare organization’s physical infrastructure,on its staff, on clinical care, on the organization’s relationship with community members, and on its evolving role as a key member of the multi-disciplinary emergency response network that operates during disasters to keep the community safe.
This section of the toolkit details specific actions that healthcare organizations can take to enhance resilience to extreme heat events. This section complements the All Hazards section, which contains actions that can build resilience to all climate change-related hazards. Both sections also include links to tools and resources that can inform and support the implementation of the recommended actions.
The following six elements characterize a heat resilient healthcare organization. Visit each element section to explore in more detail.
1. Prospective Risk Assessment
Extreme heat risk assessments in emergency management plans are traditionally retrospective. Adding forward-facing climate projections to the risk assessment can help healthcare organizations plan for changing exposures and vulnerabilities, such as more frequent, severe, and longer heat waves.
2. Health Equity and Community Engagement
Seeking community input to identify populations most at risk of negative health outcomes during and after extreme heat events helps to ensure that healthcare resilience plans prioritize health equity and community engagement. Healthcare organizations can also work with community planners, transportation authorities, and public utilities to build resilience and redundancy into community infrastructure, so that homes and essential community services, as well as healthcare facilities, are less likely to experience disruptions during heat events. Educating patients and connecting them to funding opportunities that will help to reduce their exposure to extreme heat in the community can benefit healthcare organization resilience by reducing the risk of a patient surge during or after an extreme heat event. Finally, healthcare organizations are encouraged to synchronize their heat emergency planning protocols with the local office of emergency management to enhance cross-organizational coordination during response operations.
3. Assessment and Remediation of Vulnerabilities in Infrastructure and Operations
While the drivers behind climate change are global in scale and decades in the making, patients and staff often experience climate change effects in the form of a canceled clinical appointment, a power outage, or a flooded street. Many of the actions that healthcare organizations can take to avoid disruption in clinical care involve building resilience and redundancy in their facility design and operations.
4. Collaboration Between Healthcare Organizations
The shifting landscape of patient surges, rolling brownouts and blackouts, and surges in nonclinical demands on healthcare institutions during extreme heat events can stress a healthcare facility's ability to provide high quality clinical care. Sharing information and resources across the full range of regional healthcare providers during an extreme heat event can increase resilience both at the facility level and system-wide.
5. Interdisciplinary Planning, Oversight, and Evaluation
Planning for heat resilience requires an interdisciplinary team and coordination across a range of critical functions, including administration, emergency management, IT, facility operations (e.g., power, water, waste disposal, food service, custodial services, etc.), communications, transportation, and purchasing.
6. Communications and All-Hazards Approach
Extreme heat events often occur simultaneously or in quick succession with other climate change-related hazards, such as drought, wildfire, hurricanes, and flooding. Multi-hazard events increase the risk of multiple system failures at the community scale (such as disruptions to the water and power utilities) and can result in both direct and indirect harm to population health. Repeated patient surges and cascading infrastructure failures both in the community and within healthcare facilities can temporarily disrupt the entire healthcare system in a region. Fortunately, many policy, infrastructure, and communications interventions can increase organizational resilience to more than one climate-related hazard.
References
Link to CR4HC References
Last modified:
23 August 2024 - 5:29pm
