Cadence Roundtable: Health Sector Session

Please join us 12July2024 for an over-lunch virtual whiteboard session where we are inviting health sector professionals to explore resilience, coping and adaptation to climate impacts.

Book here

The health system sadly suffers from a double edged sword of climate impacts: increased population health issues from local clmatic change and severe weather events, while wider global symptoms will cause delivery disruptions from extreme weather events, supply chain breakdown and global climate driven migration.

Elements such as the threat of Gulf Stream collapse mean in the UK we cannot even be certain whether we are preparing for a warmer or cooler climate. The one thing we know is that we need to do much more to prepare for instability and unpredictability. We need to work towards an adaptive health system and into the domains of VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous) or more recently BANI (brittle, anxious, nonlinear, incomprehensible) framings for policy making.

This roundtable, hosted by Cadence, aims to bring together people from within the health system who are ready to face these issues and to start to develop an understanding of whether current planning for climate change is effective and proportionate to the challenge. Collectively we will aim to highlight what is going well and what the key gaps are. Some indicative discussion points are:

1. How effective are the current governance processes for understanding and managing climate risk?
2. What direct risks are you currently preparing for? What are the next few novel climate risks you anticipate and how will you prepare for them?
3. What novel local and global cascade impacts should you plan for as a consequence of increased exceptional weather events?
4. How should your organisation's operating environment change, and what advocacy do you need to undertake? What do you need to know, and from whom, in order to undertake a robust risk assessment?

This initial Roundtable will be a 2 hour session to explore the terrain - if there is appetite in the group there is an opportunity to extend a collaboration towards co-creation of a sharing piece to summarise key insights and perspectives.