Primary protection: enhancing health care resilience for a changing climate

The goal of this guide and toolkit is to assist health care providers, design professionals, policymakers, and others with roles and responsibilities in assuring the continuity of quality health and human care before, during and after extreme weather events. The guide is focused on health care infrastructure resilience to climate change impacts as manifested primarily by extreme weather events.

The report examines the characteristics of health care delivery settings and defines the parameters of changing extreme weather risks; it includes case studies of actual health care infrastructure responses to historical extreme weather events; and introduces a five-element planning framework for improving health care infrastructure resilience and highlights case studies of emergent practices for improving health care resilience.