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Climate change is a threat to healthcare systems. But there are no hard and fast rules for providers on how to address challenges from extreme weather.
Two years ago, Americares and the Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (C-CHANGE) set out to change that by releasing a toolkit with resources on extreme heat, wildfires and smoke, hurricanes, and floods for health providers, administrators, and patients.
Earlier this month, the team released an updated version of the toolkit based on feedback from organizations that have been using the resource.
“We are seeing increasingly intense severe weather, we're seeing heat waves, we're seeing wildfires and wildfire smoke impacts, and we were really concerned that these are impacting our patients,” Caleb Dresser, director of Healthcare Solutions at Harvard Chan C-CHANGE, told Healthcare Brew. “We need resources for clinicians and people managing frontline clinics to deal with these impacts.”
What’s new? Americares and C-CHANGE worked with 24 clinics around the country to hear feedback on the toolkit and made updates accordingly.
The updated version includes:
- resources on how caregivers can support loved ones during extreme weather;
- a list of common medications that could increase the risk of “patient harm during extreme heat”;
- guidance about poor air quality and smoke from wildfires;
- planning tools to assist patients with higher-risk factors like pregnancy;
- additional emergency management tools for clinical staff;
- improved graphics to clearly display research around climate risks;
- and clinical documentation templates to submit after-visit summaries in the electronic medical record system.
Since its 2022 release, the toolkit has been downloaded about 20,000 times, according to C-CHANGE.
According to Dresser, the toolkit has been used by a variety of professionals like a nurse practitioner treating patients who are exposed to heat-related illness, providing information about the impacts of heat exposure and counseling resources. And a pharmacist preparing for hurricanes has also used the toolkit, Dresser told Healthcare Brew, for reviewing a checklist for emergencies and how to prepare ahead of time.
Reaching far. C-CHANGE and Americares are also working in other countries, including Australia and the Philippines, to bring more localized toolkits to clinicians around the world.
“The toolkit we have right now really was designed for a US context focused on the safety net health system,” Dresser said. “If you look at what is needed in other places, it has to be responsive to the culture, the resource availability, the burden of disease, and the hazards in that place.”
While Dresser is worried about climate change’s impact on healthcare facilities, he said there is still “quite a bit” that can be done to address extreme weather.
“The name of the game here is preparation and risk reduction, so that when hazards occur people are less likely to be impacted and clinics are less likely to be impacted,” he said. “This toolkit is trying to give people an easy-to-read, quick-to-understand way to get to the right answer.”