Community Adaptation Learning Exchange - November 30, 2023

Climate-change driven extreme weather has widespread implications for community health and the practice of medicine. This session provided an overview of climate impacts and current discussions of preparedness in the healthcare sector, including individual and community preparedness, resilience of physical infrastructure of hospitals and health centers, and emergency care network resilience. We discussed about how medical practitioners and institutions are approaching these challenges and to reveal opportunities for addressing health and medical related climate risks at an individual level.

Speaker:
Dr. Catharina Giudice is a Climate and Human Health Fellow at the Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment, Harvard University (Harvard C-CHANGE) and an emergency physician at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. She is interested in how climate events such as storms, floods, heat waves, and wildfires affect delivery of healthcare and how to enhance preparedness and resilience. Throughout her fellowship, Catharina is dedicated to focusing on health systems resilience and preparedness, with special emphasis on mitigating the health impacts of climate change on communities that are disproportionately affected.

Catharina obtained her bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley, before earning her medical degree from the University of Colorado School of Medicine. Subsequently, she completed her training in Emergency Medicine in Los Angeles. There she witnessed the worst heat waves and wildfires in Southern California’s history, which put an already overburdened healthcare system under immense strain during the COVID-19 pandemic. This experience motivated her to pursue a climate fellowship and seek innovative solutions to improve healthcare facilities’ ability to cope with climate events.