Climate change to have severe impact on health emergency services globally: Study

COPENHAGEN: Climate change is likely to have a severe impact on health emergency services around the world, international experts in emergency medicine warned on Sunday.

Despite this, few countries have assessed the scale of the impact or have a plan to deal with it, said researchers at a special session at the European Emergency Medicine Congress.

Luis Garcia Castrillo, a professor in emergency medicine at the Hospital Marques de Valdecilla, Santander, Spain, described how he and colleagues had asked 42 focus groups in 36 countries to complete a survey on climate change awareness and preparedness.

“On a scale of zero to 9, they rated the severity of the impact of climate change on health systems and specifically on emergency care, both now and in the future, at an average of 7,” Castrillo said. “This is a high figure, especially as some regions, such as northern Europe, consider it to be less of a problem than do other countries, such as Australia.

The focus groups considered that the impact of climate change on emergency medical services would be similar or even higher than on global health systems.

However, only 21 per cent of the focus group members reported that assessments of the effect of climate change on emergency medical services had been carried out, and only 38 per cent reported any measures had been taken to prepare for the impact of climate change,” the team noted in the research to be published in the European Journal of Emergency Medicine.

Out of all the focus group respondents, 62 per cent said their governments or policy makers had made no assessment of the impact of climate change on emergency services, 9 per cent said they didn’t know, 55 per cent said nothing had been done to prepare for the impact of climate change, and 10 per cent didn’t know.

“It is surprising how awareness is lacking in so many countries, as well as among emergency medicine societies. Some countries do not seem to be concerned at all. Yet this is going to affect rich and poor countries alike,” said Castrillo.

Dr Roberta Petrino, director of the Emergency Department at Ente Ospedaliero Cantonale, Lugano, Switzerland, said that one interesting finding is that the need to implement actions to mitigate climate change is considered important everywhere.

“In particular, our survey showed the need to strengthen emergency medicine services and education programmes for medical students and emergency medicine doctors, as well as research,” she mentioned.

Across all the focus group responses, the top three major risks were pollution, flooding and heatwaves. Three minor risks were cold spells, wildfires and vector-borne diseases, such as malaria.

“As we head towards the end of a year that has seen records broken for the planet’s hottest days, action cannot come quickly enough. Climate change is having an impact on all countries, rich and poor, regardless of geographical region. The world faces a climate change emergency, and our medical services face an emergency too,” the authors noted.