A climate resilient toolkit helps frontline clinics keep patients safe
Thousands of community health centers and free clinics across the U.S. care for millions of our nation’s uninsured or underinsured patients. However, increasingly intense heatwaves, hurricanes, wildfires, and other climate-related hazards threaten their ability to provide care and keep their patients healthy.
To bolster climate resilience in these frontline health clinics, we collaborated with Americares to develop the Climate Resilience for Frontline Clinics Toolkit, a resource for health care providers, patients, and clinic administrators on risk reduction and health protection before, during, and after climate-related events like heat waves, hurricanes, floods, and wildfires.
New qualitative research focused on 15 frontline clinics in the Southern and Western regions of the U.S. who piloted the toolkit, published in Journal of Climate Change and Health, shows that pilot clinics found the resource useful, felt it addressed a previously unmet need, and valued interactions with other clinics. However, they expressed concerns about the amount of information and the need for resources for patients with limited literacy. This feedback was incorporated into an updated version of the toolkit released in 2024. Findings from this study can be used to inform future efforts to deploy climate resilience resources in frontline clinics.
Users found the following helped facilitate toolkit use:
- Content was useful, topical, easy to understand, and increased awareness on how to prepare for extreme weather events
- Toolkit helped initiate conversations with patients about climate-related health risks
- Infographics were useful for patients with lower literacy levels
- Facilitated discussions with other clinics using the toolkit were valuable, generating ideas on improving clinic policies and strategies around climate-related health hazards
- Available online as a downloadable PDF
- Supportive clinical environment and culture were key to successful implementation
Challenges and opportunities identified in this study:
- Lack of leadership buy-in and skepticism about climate change impacts among clinicians, patients, and staff hindered implementation at some sites
- Short videos or presentations could be helpful to demonstrate the value of the toolkit and increase buy-in
- Achieving an appropriate balance between comprehensiveness and conciseness when presenting complex topics in a time-limited environment
- While patient-facing materials were written at 5th grade reading level and translated into Spanish, many participants felt that language complexity was still beyond their patients’ literacy level.
Guidance for future resource development
Our findings support further efforts to develop climate-related education and counseling resources for use in clinical settings but argue for pragmatic approaches that acknowledge time constraints and other challenges. Resources should be actionable, designed with the awareness of conflicting demands on clinicians and patients’ literacy level, and be available in multiple languages.
