Building Hospital and Community Resilience in the Face of Climate Change

Speaker(s):

Scott Cormier, Vice President, Emergency Management, EC, & Safety Medxcel
Seth J. Baruch, National Director Energy & Utilities National Facilities Services, Kaiser Permanente  
 

Description:

Hospitals are on the frontline of climate change, bearing the costs of increased diseases and more frequent extreme weather events. In the face of extreme weather, hospitals face suspension or closure of key operations, supply chain disruption, and reduced clinical demand and reimbursement rates. Hospitals must be able to care for their staff and communities they serve during and after extreme weather events. And after disasters that cause severe damage to communities, hospitals need to be open to keep residents employed so communities can recover. We are seeing more heat-related illness and death, asthma and allergies, more cardiovascular disease.

We are also seeing injury, death, mental health problems and forced migration due to the increase in extreme weather events. These extreme weather events continue to happen while living through the COVID-19 pandemic and both disproportionately impact vulnerable populations – low-income communities, communities of color, children, and the elderly. This panel will share the experiences of two health systems who have "weathered the storm," one in Florida and one in California.

Learn how these health systems planned and prepared for these events, including both emergency preparedness efforts in the days leading up to and during the event, as well as longer-term investments in infrastructure and planning. Panelists will share their approaches to managing heat waves, hurricanes, and wildfires and highlight best practices for creating climate-ready hospitals as anchors for resilient communities.

Learning Objectives: 

• Understand how climate change impacts health and health care’s contribution to greenhouse gas emissions.
• Be able to articulate how climate change threatens a hospital’s ability to provide continuous care and emergency services.
• Understand how leading health systems are transitioning to climate-smart health care and building more resiliency for their hospitals and communities.
• Learn about new resilient technologies like microgrids that can help keep operations running during a power outage.