HEAT MAP: The Impact of Climate Change and Heat Events on Health in Singapore

As climate change continues to adversely impact human health and healthcare systems, Singapore is expected to experience increases in ambient heat and humidity in the near future, to the point where population health may be compromised.

Heat-related illnesses (HRIs) are expected to increase significantly with rising temperatures. To promote preventive measures and develop efficient patient management strategy, accelerated epidemiological studies to elucidate the risk factors, occurrence patterns, and clinical characteristics of HRIs, especially in vulnerable populations, are needed.

However, in-depth investigation on clinical data related to HRIs is still limited. Therefore, this project aims to evaluate how heat stress level affects the incidence and severity of heat-related illnesses and other diseases in Singapore.

We will utilise the TRUST platform to extract the data of de-identified patients with emergency department visits and/or admissions in public hospitals and visits to polyclinics. We will summarise the patients’ demographics and occurrence conditions, dispositions, and mortality in relation to the past climate conditions. In addition, we aim to feed the data into established climate forecasting models to project future HRI burden in Singapore as well as model the impact of potential interventions to build heat resilience in our communities.