With catastrophic flooding drowning large sections of the east coast and severe bushfire conditions predicted nationally this summer, the RACGP is calling for GPs to be more involved in disaster planning.
The call comes on the back of a new report by the AIHW, Let’s Talk about the Weather: Injuries Related to Extreme Weather, which showed that the number of hospital admissions for injuries associated with extreme weather – such as heatwaves, bushfires, and storms – has increased over the past decade.
Extreme weather-related hospitalisations spiked at over 1,000 cases every three years, with the spikes becoming progressively higher. There were 1,027 injury hospitalisations in 2013–14, 1,033 in 2016–17 and 1,108 in 2019–20.
In each of these three years, extreme heat had the biggest impact on hospitalisations and deaths, accounting for 7,104 injury hospitalisations and 293 deaths in the 10-year period analysed, including 267 hospitalisations in WA.
“Evidence has shown that over the past three decades, there has been an increase in the frequency and severity of extreme weather events, such as extreme heat, bushfires, extreme cold, rain and storm-related events including high rainfall, floods and cyclones,” AIHW spokesperson Dr Heather Swanston said.
“We are seeing this reflected in hospitalisations and deaths, and in the 10 years from 2012 to 2022, there were 9,119 hospitalisations for injury in Australia directly attributable to extreme weather. Over a similar period, from 2011 to 2021, there were 677 deaths due to extreme weather-related injury.”
During the 10-year period analysed, there were 773 injury hospitalisations and 242 deaths related to extreme cold, while extreme rain or storms accounted for 348 injury hospitalisations and 77 deaths.
“This report includes injuries that were directly attributable to weather-related events but does not include injuries that were indirectly related. For example, it doesn’t include injuries from road traffic accidents that occur due to wet weather since the primary cause of injury would be recorded as ‘transport’,” Dr Swanston said.
“The data doesn’t include injuries where patients were treated in hospital emergency departments and didn’t require admission to the hospital.”
The Bureau of Meteorology has declared an El Niño is underway and is likely to continue until at least the end of February 2024, which in Australia includes a period of reduced rainfall, higher temperatures and increased bushfire danger and the report highlighted the need to develop weather-related injury surveillance systems.
Another study released this week in Nature Geoscience found that 95.5% of observed mega floods could have been anticipated based on previous events at similar locations.
RACGP President Dr Nicole Higgins said GPs played a critical role in supporting communities impacted by disasters and could do much more if they were better embedded in disaster planning and management.
“As we’ve seen in past bushfires, floods and cyclones, GPs play a key role caring for people and communities when disasters strike, as well as during the aftermath and recovery,” Dr Higgins said.
“But GPs who’ve been on the frontline during bushfires have told us that they’re held back from doing all they can due to lack of consistent communication and coordination from the disaster response team.
“This is why GPs need to be embedded in disaster planning and management, to ensure the right systems are in place before a crisis strikes. Especially with Australia facing what’s predicted to be the most significant bushfire season since Black Summer.”
The other critical concern raised by experts, where there was a clear role for GPs to engage with disaster planning, was the emerging threat of climate change-related zoonotic disease.
An analysis of 60 years of historical epidemiological data, published this week in BMJ Global Health, found that four types of zoonotic infections have been increasing at an “exponential rate,” amid a general pattern of increasingly larger and more frequent ‘spillover’ epidemics.
Based on current trends, the researchers warned that these 4 types of viral pathogens were collectively set to kill 12 times as many people in 2050 as they did in 2020, with the number of spill-over events and reported deaths attributable to these four groups of viruses increasing by almost 5% and 9%, respectively, every year between 1963 and 2019.
They too noted the need for healthcare professionals to be included in disaster response planning in response to the increasing zoonotic threat.
Dr Higgins said GPs needed to be more involved in emergency planning and response at state and local level, where much of the ground-level planning took place.
“Every practice does disaster planning as part of general practice accreditation so we are prepared for disasters individually, yet we’re not included in local, state, and national-level planning, which would enable general practice to do so much more for communities in need,” she said.