Max Parmentier, chief executive and co-founder of healthcare tech platform Birdie, looks at technology’s role in mitigating the effects of extreme weather on the elderly.

The recent heatwave throughout Europe cast climate-related public health concerns into the light. Measuring its effect is complicated. Past heat waves have killed up to an estimated 900 people in the UK. For care providers, these concerns carry particular importance. Unpredictable fires may have sprung up in specific drier areas. One vulnerable community at most risk is spread across every corner of the country: the elderly.

Older adults struggle to handle the heat because their bodies are less efficient at regulating their internal temperatures. Their ability to sense when the weather is hot, or whether they’re dehydrated, is also limited compared to younger people. Their hearts are weaker. Their glands release less sweat. They may even consume medications that affect their capacity for temperature regulation. All this puts the elderly at higher risk during heat waves.

Care providers will, however, struggle to provide the necessary services to guarantee the health of their customers during this time. The sector is experiencing a massive staff shortage with over 100,000 vacancies unfilled. That means existing staff will have less time to care for more people. But providers must do everything they can to guarantee the safety of the UK’s elderly population as the high temperatures continue.

Prioritising staff education

As people get older, they will need a varying level of support and care, which is why they must be supported by people who can keep a close check on their health during situations such as excessive heat. This task, however, requires specific knowledge that many care professionals may not have received training on. Specific signs of heat stress, dehydration, or exhaustion might be obscure or require specialised education to recognise and respond to. Without that knowledge, care professionals might be just as much in the dark as the people they’re looking after.

Care professionals should receive training to learn about the main signs of heat stress as a priority. These signs include loss of appetite, dizziness, confusion, and cramps. They also include various other, more obscure signs that care professionals can find out about from trained professionals.

Recognising the signs of heat exhaustion is a start but it is important their training encompasses how to respond effectively in these situations. Care providers must ensure that any training or information they provide includes accurate, science-backed detail relating to mitigation methods and responses. For example, many people know that it’s important to drink water in hot weather but many are unaware of the importance of combining that with a healthy, balanced diet to provide the salts that are lost through sweating.

If a customer suffering from heat exhaustion has symptoms that last longer than half an hour, care professionals should seek help from a doctor. It’s important (and often difficult) to recognise the possible consequences of inaction in such situations.

Improving the care sector’s efficiency

Staff training and education will do a lot to help care professionals respond to heat-related health problems. But as the UK’s care providers continue to experience severe staff shortages, there’s only so much a care professional can do with the time they have. Under increasing pressure, mistakes will be made. Rushing from one customer to the next will likely create a system that fails to guarantee the health of those who are most vulnerable.

One of the best ways to improve care and reduce heat-related health risks without increasing personnel is to improve the efficiency of existing staff and organisational systems. Adopting processes that prioritise the most vulnerable can and will save lives, however, the sector’s historic approach has not always aligned with this approach. Limited technological advances in the care sector have restricted the possibilities of providing personalised care, and as a result, many care providers have struggled to manage their time as required.

Technology can help. Many sectors have undergone so-called ‘digital transformations’ over the past few years to exploit the benefits of innovative new tech. The care sector is only beginning to do so. Yet for many care providers, existing software and hardware could make significant improvements to their workflows, systems, and overall provision of care. When dealing with the fallout of extreme weather events like a heatwave, technological adoption not only saves lives, it works as a competitive advantage too.

Using technology to respond to extreme conditions

So how can tech help care providers best protect the vulnerable during extreme weather conditions? In every imaginable way. But the collection and analysis of data, along with the provision of actionable insights based on those analyses, present the most significant benefit.

Intelligence has always been king when it comes to the provision of personalised care and this is especially true when dealing with vulnerable people. Our ability to harvest and analyse data, however, was previously limited. Now, following the digital revolution, our capacity to do so has expanded at a rapid pace.

This is because modern platforms can now collect data much more easily and on a much bigger scale than before. Instead of filling out visitation logs on paper, care professionals can input information into a mobile-based digital platform. That information could include anything from prescribed medication to general customer condition notes and incident reports. The platform can then save that information with a much larger storage capacity than previous technologies (eg. filing cabinets) allowed.

Advanced data analysis tools present the next, and crucial step in the process. Data in isolation won’t lead to any meaningful impact without a process to accurately assess the insight and act accordingly. 

Machine algorithms can now process data in real-time, spotting trends that produce actionable insights for care providers to respond to. In the event of a heatwave, for example, data relating to customers’ historic experience, medication schedule, and even living conditions can be evaluated to suggest who care professionals should prioritise during their daily rounds. Predictive analytics means software can even complete this task in advance, which can be especially vital when experiencing staff shortages.

Heat-related health problems are almost always preventable. But when they do occur, data collected about customers can further help their provision of care by informing health professionals about their conditions. Care providers have the opportunity to compile massive datasets relating to their customers, which can all be shared with health professionals when they do need to get involved. This can accelerate the process and make doctors’ lives easier.

Responding to extreme weather conditions is a massive task for under-resourced care providers. Educating care professionals must come first, but improving their efficiency with actionable insights presents a solution with much wider and farther-reaching results.