Four emergency rooms closed over one frigid weekend in early February in Boston as health systems dealt with operational issues such as frozen pipes, prompting questions about preparedness for such extreme weather, The Boston Globe reported Feb. 19.
Such closures may have been short-lived, but health systems need to pay closer attention to the risks of extreme weather and the resilience of their infrastructure as the effects of climate change spread, experts say.
"There have been a record number of hospital evacuations and closures [nationally] in the last decade due to climate," Paul Biddinger, MD, chief preparedness and continuity officer at Mass General Brigham, told the Globe. "Those events are a harbinger, and [climate readiness] is something that needs attention."
The issue goes beyond hospitals. In a national survey, 81 percent of primary clinic care staff said their locations experienced some kind of disruption due to weather-related issues within the past three years, according to the Globe. Fewer than 20 percent of such staff said their facility was "very resilient."
Health systems must also work together to better coordinate in such emergencies even as, for example, there were efforts to move patients from one closed emergency room to another during the February incident in Boston. Or, as in the case of the non-climate change-related fire at Brockton (Mass.) Hospital where all statewide hospitals were called on to offer available beds.
"Whether these cold snaps are a function of greenhouse gasses or not, they give us an indication, a canary in the coal mine view, of what a destabilized climate means for access to care for people who need it," Aaron Bernstein, MD, interim director of the Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, told the Globe of the Boston emergency room closures. "In this case a broken pipe [affected just] the emergency room. But what if the power goes out, or the roads are flooded around a hospital?"