Climate resilience adaptation and psychiatric emergency services utilization during extreme heat in Boston, MA: a difference-in-differences analysis

Background

A growing body of literature shows that extreme heat events increase the risk of adverse mental health outcomes. However, the effectiveness of adaptation efforts has not been evaluated to date. This study investigates the implementation of two citywide interventions on extreme heat events in Boston, Massachusetts, focusing on psychiatric emergency services use.

Methods

Using a quasi-experimental study design with a difference-in-differences estimator, we investigate how interventions for excess heat and heat events may change daily psychiatric emergency services use: 1) heat advisory alerts and 2) a climate resilience adaptation plan. We flagged excess heat (maximum heat index ≥90 °F) and heat events (≥2 consecutive hours of heat index ≥100 °F). We linked heat exposures with daily total psychiatric emergency services encounters in a population of predominantly publicly insured and uninsured patients. We estimated incidence rate ratios (IRR) and 95 % confidence intervals (CI) in a Poisson regression, adjusting for temporal variation.

Results

Among 110,656 encounters from 2005 to 2021, we did not find evidence of a difference in psychiatric emergency services use for heat events with and without advisories (IRR = 1.06, 95 % CI: 0.93, 1.19). Among 48,973 encounters from 2014 to 2019, we did not find evidence of a difference in psychiatric emergency services use for extreme heat events before compared to after the climate adaptation plan implementation (IRR = 1.03, 95 % CI: 0.97, 1.09).

Conclusions

Our findings did not show protective effects of two citywide interventions for excess heat and heat events on psychiatric services use.