Climate Adaptation in Out-Of-Hospital Settings: Building Strategic Disaster Resilience in Ambulance Operations

The study contributes insights to the academic dialogue surrounding the resilience and practices of ambulance services, particularly in the context of escalating climate-related risks and overlapping disasters, such as pandemics. This study uses a pragmatic lens to highlight the implications for operational adjustments within the British Columbia Emergency Health Services (BCEHS) and comparable organizations. This research focus is a single BCEHS case study on the ambulance system’s resilience in the face of climate change-related disasters. The research focuses on operational capacity and organizational resilience in the context of climate disasters, such as wildfires, floods, heatwaves, and other health emergencies, such as pandemics. Key findings indicate challenges in organizational resilience, with staffing shortages emerging as the most-cited risk identified by 88.3% of respondents, highlighting vulnerabilities. The study applies the principles of high reliability organizations (HRO) and a complexity lens (i.e., wicked problems) and uses a mixed-methods approach involving interviews, a focus group, and a Likert-scale survey. The data were captured from disasters such as COVID-19, the 2021 British Columbia “heat dome” heatwave, and atmospheric river flooding in British Columbia in fall 2021 to explore and offer suggestions to improve situational awareness, disaster planning, and training and exercises, as well as developing strategies to include climate-related disaster risk in organizational planning and risk assessments.

Author dc:creator

• Hogya, Brooks

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Cox, Robin

• College of interdisciplinary studies

Language dc:language.iso

en_US

Identifier URI

https://doi.org/10.25316/ir-20328

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:null:10613/28759