The impact of climate change, successive heat waves and climate-based events has become an undeniable fact for the world’s healthcare industry with many countries racing to assess the damage to their healthcare systems and staff amid yet another record-breaking summer.
For the most part, healthcare entities have very much been keen to tout their adherence to green and sustainable futures, but these attitudes have been somewhat undercut by the rapid adoption of AI, which can streamline operations and expedite diagnostics but is also liable to use significantly more electricity than human-based systems. Research by the World Economic Forum estimates that a typical AI platform uses around 33 times more energy to complete a task than task-specific software would.
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US ecological agency National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA) has warned that 2024 is on track to become the hottest year in the body’s 175-year history. In the UK, research conducted by Chatham House this month found that 93% of 152 extreme-weather attribution studies found that human-induced climate change made extreme heat events more likely or more severe. At the same time, the body found that heatwaves felt across the US, Mexico and Central America were made 35 times more likely and 1.4°C warmer because of climate change.
Heatwaves mean greater usage of healthcare systems as more and more people suffer the effects of intense weather events, as a result, this brings down greater stress on healthcare workers alongside heat-based malfunctions and exacerbates facility costs as air conditioners run over time.
At the May MedTech Forum conference in Vienna, speakers urged attendees to take the problem as seriously as any other.
Speaking on behalf of the World Health Organization climate consultant Antonius Kolimenakis, said: “There is a lot of evidence that the climate crisis is indeed a health crisis, around 6.7 million deaths a year are indirectly linked with pollution. Now we can see the direct impact that pollution has on our health. We will also experience floods, and droughts – all these things that will also put pressure on things like food supplies which will have an impact on health.”
Speaking with Hospital Management, managing director for life sciences consulting at GlobalData, Tim Dall, detailed how as resources become scarce and people remain on the move some healthcare systems may not have the incentives to prepare for the impacts of climate change.
Dall said: “As climate change becomes more intense and resources start to shift to address that, it just means that there are fewer resources for the workers. So, when you take a healthcare system that is already struggling financially to pay workers, anything that diverts resources away from them has the implications of less competitive pay and so on.
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By GlobalData“With climate change, there are predictions of more unusual weather patterns, and that in turn creates demand for healthcare during these weather events meaning that the workforce will be stressed. In extreme events where you have a family where one of them is a healthcare worker and they are needed at the hospital and yet they have a family to take care of, that puts additional stress on the individual and could cause people to have second thoughts about their jobs.”
“One thing to consider is as AI, I think health systems will start to adopt AI more readily. Some health systems are already exploring what non-critical job functions can be replaced with AI. There are concerns that AI, because it’s very energy intensive, it can contribute to the speed at which climate change happens.”
New to the West
From a Western perspective, the drastic increase in heat and climate-related incidents has been a recent trend with alarms only being sounded across the healthcare industries across the past decade as heatwaves and climate events push Western hospitals past their capacity.
However, elsewhere in developing and equatorial nations the impacts of extreme heat and its quickly exacerbating effects have been a persistent problem for longer than European and North American nations have been scrambling to mitigate its effects.
Research examining the impact of climate change on middle and low-income countries, published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health earlier this year, found: “The poor training, a lack of education, and a shortage of qualified health professionals makes it difficult for them to play their role in addressing climate change’s impacts, as their attention is largely focused on healthcare delivery and they may not have the time and capacity to consider the direct and indirect impacts of the climate on healthcare.
“The WHO reports that the greatest shortage of health workers is found in low- and middle-income countries. Current trends in health worker production and employment will not have a sufficient impact on the needs-based shortage of healthcare workers by 2030. Consequently, healthcare providers will have to work even harder to make up for the demand-supply gap.”
One of the primary ways that successive heatwaves and climate change have affected healthcare staffing, besides the direct impact on day-to-day operations, is how it affects the migration of healthcare workers. Beyond socioeconomic factors, climate change has been one of the primary drivers of migration from hotter equatorial countries to more temperate states. With them, skilled workers have moved from lower and middle-income countries putting more of a more intense strain on their healthcare systems and making preparations for the direct impact of climate change that much harder.
In the UK, a 2019 study following 14 professionals in the National Health Service (NHS) found that health staff faced significant difficulty in managing heat risks. The summer of 2019 saw, what were for the time, record-breaking highs in temperature resulting in an estimated 900 excess deaths. The study, published in The British Medical Journal, concluded that staff needed further development and strategic, long-term planning to mitigate the effects of heatwaves.
In its 2023 report “Countdown on health and climate change”, medical journal The Lancet found that in 2021 low and middle-income countries reported the highest proportion of cities with no plans for a climate change risk assessment.
Plans in Place
A few countries have made efforts to make their healthcare systems resilient against the effects of climate change in the hope of buffering against the inevitable financial and social disasters.
In Canada, Minister for Health, Mark Holland, has brought two proposals before the country’s parliament calling for up to $17.7m in funding awarded to the Climate Change and Health Capacity Building programme. Set to come in two arms, $4.5m of which is set to support efforts towards building climate-resilient and low-carbon health systems. The remaining $13.2m will be used to protect the health of people in Canada from extreme heat, through the new HeatADAPT programme.
Speaking to Hospital Management a spokesperson for the Canadian Health Minister said: “In 2019, through HealthADAPT, Health Canada selected ten Canadian health authorities across five provinces and territories to receive federal funding to develop projects that address climate-driven health risks.
“The HealthADAPT projects included vulnerability and adaptation assessments of health units and broader regions and the development of health adaptation plans to address priority risks.
“In addition to increased patient admissions, transfers, and strain on morgue use due to increased mortality, elevated temperature and heat during extreme heat events have forced the closure of sections of hospitals including operating theatres.
“Climate change impacts may exceed the thresholds of current health and related systems (for example; surge capacity, infrastructure design), which were designed based on assumptions of a stable climate that are now decades old. Adaptation measures must be scaled up rapidly and substantially if current and future health impacts are to be reduced.”
In the US, progress has been somewhat slower, but the country is still on track to meet some of the same heat-induced disasters as some of its more equatorial neighbours.
Last year, the Center for American Progress (CAP) predicted that that year heatwaves alone would cost the US economy as much as $1bn in lost revenue with that figure estimated to rise in conjunction with the temperatures. That same report also found that a single US heatwave in a single state in 2023 resulted in almost 400 additional ambulatory care visits, 7,000 additional emergency department visits and almost 2,000 additional heat-related hospital admissions.
Now the group is calling on healthcare businesses and systems to take full advantage of green technologies and prepare for the effects of climate change.
Speaking with Hospital Management, director of public health policy at CAP, Jill Rosenthall, said: “We have seen that the healthcare sector actually has been kind of behind other sectors and addressing the impact of climate change.
“One of the recommendations we are making is for the healthcare sector to really take advantage of new resources that are available to upgrade systems and to become more energy efficient and to be more resilient to climate impacts.
“Things such as the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) provide resources that can be used for those purposes and the healthcare system hasn’t really taken advantage of them so much, so there are actions happening now to educate healthcare providers and help them learn how to tap into those resources. That’s a big recommendation.
“We want to look for ways that will allow the federal government to hold healthcare providers responsible for not making the changes they want to make.”
