Climate change: Canada’s healthcare system isn’t ready for new reality, doctors say

Montreal family doctor Claudel Pétrin-Desrosiers sees climate change as an all-encompassing “risk intensifier”.

She says it increases the potential for danger across the board, from threatening the most basic health determinants like air quality and access to food and water to exacerbating seasonal allergies and tick-borne Lyme disease.

Pétrin-Desrosiers, president of the Quebec section of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment, is among a group of doctors who say Canada’s healthcare system is unprepared for the worsening effects of climate change.

Finola Hackett, a medical assistant who works in rural communities in southern Alberta, said if you ignore the climate crisis when it comes to health, it will be very costly in the long run, not just in terms of dollars, but in terms of people human lives.

Both say acting now has the potential to save lives.

“That’s motivation enough for us to do the work,” said Pétrin-Desrosiers.

Hackett and Pétrin-Desrosiers are the lead co-authors of a policy brief on Canada released last week alongside a global Lancet Countdown report on health and climate change, published by the medical journal Lancet.

The Lancet report underscores the health risks of global warming, citing as an example the heat dome that settled over British Columbia in the summer of 2021.

The heat dome, which has caused more than 600 deaths in BC, would have been “virtually impossible” without the impact of climate change, the peer-reviewed report said.

According to Canada’s Policy Brief, the healthcare system has the potential to increase resilience to such extreme heat and other climate-related health risks, but is far from ready, especially in light of the COVID-19 pandemic.

It says heatwaves could increase the number of emergency room visits by 10 to 15 percent, further straining healthcare capacity and reducing the quality of care.

In Alberta, Hackett said she sees patients with asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or COPD, during times of wildfire smoke pollution.

Both Hackett and Pétrin-Derosiers said they are also concerned about the impact of climate change on mental health after seeing evidence of increasing cases of post-traumatic stress disorder following extreme weather events such as flooding.

That’s worrying, Pétrin-Desrosiers said, because access to mental health care is already lacking in the public system, with long waiting lists across the country.

Health Canada’s own climate change and health assessment, released earlier this year, says global warming is “already affecting the health of Canadians and without concerted action will continue to result in injury, disease and death.”

Greater warming will pose greater risks, but many impacts could be avoided “if Canada now rapidly and significantly increases its adaptation efforts,” the report says.

The links between climate change and health are also the focus of Canada’s Chief Public Health Officer, Theresa Tam’s annual report released last week.

The report states that “urgent public health action is needed to prepare for, protect against, and respond to the current and future health impacts of climate change.”

Both the Health Canada report and the Public Health Officer emphasize the importance of including those most affected by climate change in adaptation planning, noting that vulnerability is often associated with additional social inequalities such as low income, inadequate housing and food insecurity.

Such reports, along with some provincial-level action, show that the health risks of climate change are becoming increasingly recognized, Hackett says.

“But whether we have actually taken any action in our clinics, in our hospitals, in our healthcare organizations, we are only at the beginning,” she says.

Canada’s Policy Brief notes that the BC, Ontario and Quebec governments have taken steps to assess links between climate change and health, but Hackett said such initiatives are “fragmented” without some sort of national coordination.

Similarly, Pétrin-Derosiers said Health Canada has a paper commitment to improving health system resilience, but this has not yet translated into action at the pace needed to address the growing risks.

The physicians’ policy brief recommends that provincial and territorial health officials conduct climate resilience assessments to identify priority actions and calls on Ottawa to establish a national secretariat “to coordinate the transformation of Canada’s health care system” into one that protects against the Impact resilient is climate change.

It suggests adaptation actions that could include climate risk training for health workers and the creation of public health contingency plans for extreme weather events.

The federal government is expected to finalize a national climate change adaptation strategy by the end of this year, in which health and well-being will be one of five key areas.

This report from The Canadian Press was first published on October 30, 2021.