Sustain Health Solutions

124 million people. That's how many were under air quality alerts this week from wildfire smoke alone. 📋 The Vitals — Vol. I, No. 12 is out. 💨 Wildfire smoke is a clinical event. Hospitals should act before the plume becomes an admission. Build an AQI-to-action playbook, identify high-risk patients before smoke arrives, and protect hospital indoor air — don't wait for crisis-level readings. ⚽ This Sunday's World Cup Final: a 1-in-8 chance of dangerous heat at MetLife Stadium, no roof, no AC. EDs and EMS near the venue need surge plans finalized now. 🌡️ Heat deaths are preventable — if cooling access is treated as healthcare infrastructure. Maricopa County proved it: deaths fell after years of increases. But the funding behind it is expiring going into peak summer. 🫀 New clinical signal: heat is reshaping kidney disease, pediatric ED visits, and nighttime cardiovascular recovery. Cardiac ICU admissions nearly double — from 18.1% to 32.5% — after six or more consecutive days of extreme heat. Sustained exposure, not single-day peaks, may be the more dangerous threshold. 💻 AI is raising your power bill — and crowding out the capital most companies need to hit their own climate targets. Most S&P 500 companies with emissions targets are falling behind them. ♻️ PFAS and polystyrene are both moving from awareness to procurement. Litigation is accelerating faster than regulation, and states are restricting single-use foam faster than industry can rebrand it. 💡 The takeaway: Smoke crossing borders, a mass-gathering event days away, funding cuts colliding with rising mortality, infrastructure straining under simultaneous demand. Preparedness — not surprise — is what separates a manageable week from a crisis. 📎 Full newsletter attached. The Vitals is published every Friday by Sustain Health Solutions. 📩 connect@sustainhealthsolutions.org #TheVitals #ClimateHealth #WildfireSmoke #HeatSafety #HealthcareSustainability #SustainHealthSolutions #PublicHealth #HospitalResilience

Canadian Wildfire Smoke Is a Healthcare Preparedness Issue Wildfire smoke is increasingly affecting communities far beyond the location of the fire itself. Smoke from Canadian wildfires can travel across the Great Lakes, Upper Midwest, New York, New England, and other parts of the United States, creating rapidly changing air-quality conditions and new clinical and operational risks for healthcare organizations. This is not only an environmental or weather issue. It is a population-health, patient-safety, workforce, and healthcare-operations issue. We have heard growing concern from healthcare leaders, clinicians, sustainability teams, facilities professionals, and public-health partners about how health systems should prepare for recurrent smoke events. In response, we developed a practical healthcare-system advisory focused on immediate action and long-term preparedness. Healthcare organizations should be ready to: • Translate AQI forecasts into clear operational triggers • Protect hospital indoor air through HVAC optimization, filtration, monitoring, and cleaner-air spaces • Identify patients at highest respiratory, cardiovascular, pregnancy-related, clinical, and social risk • Provide early outreach and clear, multilingual patient guidance • Prepare emergency, ambulatory, inpatient, respiratory, pharmacy, employee-health, and communications teams • Anticipate changes in demand rather than waiting for emergency visits to rise • Build repeatable smoke-response protocols before the next plume arrives Longer term, healthcare must go beyond responding to individual events. Health systems need climate-resilient facilities, stronger community partnerships, better integration of environmental risk into clinical workflows, and sustained efforts to reduce the emissions contributing to worsening climate-related health threats. Preparedness is the difference between noticing smoke and managing risk. See the plume. Find the risk. Protect the patient. Planetary Health Intelligence by Sustain Health Solutions #WildfireSmoke #AirQuality #HealthcarePreparedness #HealthcareResilience #ClimateAndHealth #PlanetaryHealth #PublicHealth #HealthEquity #SustainHealthSolutions

🔥 Heat is a Clinical Event - It can be forecasted (weather prediction) - Consequences should be prevented (high-risk/vulnerable patient registry and targeted outreach) - Our contribution must be mitigated (environmental impact assessment and mitigation) - Resilience of the infrastructure is a must (Hazard vulnerability assessment, "stress tests" and planning) Listen to this brief episode based on our Playbook for patients, clinicians, and health systems *made with the help of NotebookLM

♨️ Extreme heat is not just a weather event. It is a clinical event. Another major heat dome is now spreading across the United States. The National Weather Service is warning of dangerous #heat across the central and eastern U.S., with the most intense conditions shifting toward the Northeast. Heat advisories are already in place across parts of New York and Connecticut, where heat indices may exceed 100°F this week. More than 90 temperature records—many of them overnight lows—could be tied or broken by Wednesday. Those warm nights matter clinically: when temperatures remain elevated after sunset, the body loses an essential opportunity to cool and recover. For vulnerable patients, heat may not first present as “heat illness.” It may appear as: - Heart failure or arrhythmia. - Acute kidney injury or electrolyte disturbance. - Dizziness, falls, syncope, or delirium. - Worsening respiratory disease. - Medication-related complications. - An unsafe discharge to a home without adequate cooling. What can we do in healthcare? 🏥 Hospitals should not wait for heat-related emergency visits to rise. We can identify vulnerable patients, create heat-risk registries, review medications, incorporate cooling access into discharge planning, conduct proactive outreach during alerts, and coordinate with community and public-health partners. The NWS HeatRisk framework specifically recognizes that prolonged extreme heat without overnight relief can affect not only individuals, but also health systems and infrastructure. Extreme heat is foreseeable. Preventable harm should be, too. #ExtremeHeat #HeatHealth #PatientSafety #ClimateAndHealth #PlanetaryHealth #PopulationHealth #HealthEquity #HealthcareInnovation #SustainHealthSolutions

#WorldPopulationDay2026 More than 8 billion lives share one planet—and young people will live longest with the decisions we make now. This year’s World Population Day theme, “Realizing the hopes and aspirations of young people—today and for the future,” should resonate deeply with healthcare. We often build health systems around the population and disease burden of today. But are we designing them for the world young people will actually inherit? A warming climate, polluted air, food and water insecurity, emerging infectious diseases, and growing mental-health pressures are not peripheral concerns. They are increasingly shaping health across the life course. We believe healthcare organizations must understand their environmental footprint not simply as a reporting obligation, but as an investment in the health, opportunity, and resilience of future generations. The emissions we prevent, resources we conserve, and healthier communities we help build today can reduce cumulative risks for decades to come. Population growth alone is not the story. Population stewardship is. #WorldPopulationDay #PlanetaryHealth #SustainableHealthcare #ClimateAndHealth #YouthHealth

Historic heat. Historic Cyclospora outbreak. Coincidence — or a deeper signal? 📋 The Vitals — Vol. I, No. 11 is out. 🔥 Heatdome and Aftermath - 29 dead in NJ. A hospital ED flooded. 20,000+ in Europe in one week. Attribution science: this heat wave was 200× more likely than 20 years ago. 🤎 1,500+ cyclosporiasis cases nationwide — 1,251 in Michigan alone. Same conditions that killed people in NJ homes are degrading food safety. Climate, heat, water quality, and infectious disease risk are one story. 🚲 A cyclist killed in Boston on an unprotected bike lane 💐. Health systems are anchor employers and community health advocates. Built-environment safety is a clinical issue. ⚗️ EPA permanently rolling back ethylene oxide rules for medical sterilization. Cancer risk for surrounding communities. Supply chain risk for hospitals. Investment in alternatives is the only answer. 💻 Communities pushing back on unchecked data centers — grid strain, water use, energy costs. The grid that hospitals depend on during heat emergencies is the same grid under stress. 🌏 Two sustainability conferences this month — Sustain Health Solutions is at both: 📍 Massachusetts Health & Hospital Association / MassHealth Healthcare Sustainability Summit — July 29, Burlington MA. Register now. Need help with GHG reporting? Reach out. 🌎 Bloomberg Sustainable Business Summit Singapore — July 22. Come find us. 💡 None of these are separate from healthcare. All of them arrive at the clinical front door. 📎 Full newsletter attached. The Vitals · Every Friday · Sustain Health Solutions 📩 connect@sustainhealthsolutions.org #TheVitals #ClimateHealth #HeatSafety #Cyclosporiasis #OneHealth #HealthcareSustainability #SustainHealthSolutions #PublicHealth

🌍 How do we make sustainability reporting, governance, and decision-making truly reflect ecological reality? This is one of the central questions behind #Track1: Sustainability Science, Law, and Accounting for Environmental Governance at the 21st Interdisciplinary Conference on “Intangibles, Sustainability, and Value Creation”, hosted by the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, on September 17–18, 2026. We are especially proud to highlight that Shruti Kashyap, Senior Advisor to Sustain Health Solutions, is Chair of Track One and helping lead this important interdisciplinary conversation. We see this as directly relevant to healthcare and beyond: sustainability cannot remain a parallel reporting exercise. It must be integrated into governance, accounting, law, risk management, and operational decision-making. Track 1 focuses on how environmental science can be meaningfully connected with: • Double materiality and ecological adequacy • Nature-related data, metrics, measurement, and valuation • Sustainability reporting, regulation, and governance • Management control for sustainability and nature-related risks • Systemic, cross-domain, and cascading risks across ecosystems, organizations, and society 📌 Submission deadline: July 15, 2026 📍 Conference: September 17–18, 2026 | University of Gothenburg, Sweden For researchers, policymakers, and practitioners working at the intersection of sustainability science, law, accounting, management, governance, and real-world value creation — this is a timely and important forum. #Sustainability #EnvironmentalGovernance #SustainabilityScience #DoubleMateriality #NatureRelatedRisk #SustainabilityReporting #Governance #HealthcareSustainability #ValueCreation

📢Our editorial in JAMA Cardiology Warming Planet, Aging Population and Cardiovascular Crisis This past few weeks have been particularly challenging from extreme heat standpoint across the continents... We encourage and support #healthcare to take the leading role in both #climate #resiliency and #mitigation Sadeer Al-Kindi | Sumanth Khadke | Sarju Ganatra