Emergency room visits increase in California on excessive heat days 

Extreme heat means hundreds of additional visits to local emergency rooms, impacting communities all over Southern California. 

At Olive View UCLA Medical Center in Sylmar, they are preparing for people who are feeling the effects of the heat. 

Dr. Greg Moran, Chief of the emergency department at Olive View UCLA Medical Center and professor of clinical emergency medicine at UCLA, says they have equipment that can be used to cool down people, including a blanket with tubing that circulates hot water. The blanket is often put under the patient.  

“We haven't seen, thankfully, any really severe heat stroke cases yet at our hospital. That will likely change at some point over the summer because it's supposed to be a hot summer,” Moran said. 

“Sometimes people just get over-heated, they get a little bit dehydrated. They can experience syncope, which is fainting sometimes. That is definitely more common in the heat. We'll see a lot of people who maybe if it wasn't so hot, might have had the physiological reserve to not get to that point,” he added. 

On a hot day,  there are 8,222 additional emergency room visits across California and in Los Angeles County alone, more than 1,500 additional visits to emergency rooms for heat-related problems, according to researchers at UCLA’s Center for Healthy Climate Solutions.  

The group’s heat map and data show emergency room visits that happen on an extreme heat day compared to a non-extreme heat day.   

The area near Moran’s emergency room in the San Fernando Valley shows high numbers of ER visits on days where temperatures are like what we’ve been experiencing recently.  

“That doesn't surprise me at all. And a lot of those visits may not even be technically categorized officially as heat-related visits. But we know that when it's hot, we do see an increase in just general types of complaints -- people who complain of dizziness, complain of nausea, complain sometimes they'll feel short of breath, they'll feel some of those other symptoms that may be either directly or indirectly related to the heat,” he said. 

Researchers behind the heat maps say knowing which communities are at risk from extreme heat can help officials create programs and projects to increase shade or target the most affected neighborhoods.  

According to the state’s “Protecting Californians From Extreme Heat: A State Action Plan to Build Community Resilience”, better reporting is needed -- something that has been available but has not yet been put in place. 

The action plan says in part: 

“...Syndromic surveillance systems provide monitoring capabilities on health conditions and symptoms in near real-time from hospital emergency departments. Full participation across the state in such a system would provide near real-time data to identify heat illness events early, monitor trends, and track illnesses, and therefore support officials to respond quickly to minimize health risks from extreme heat events. The Department of Public Health has the capacity to report on syndromic surveillance data, but additional resources are needed to increase the uptake of use of this system throughout the state (only 46 of 320 emergency departments are currently reporting data). This action was called for in the 2013 Report and implementation has not been completed....” 

“If we attribute it to a heat related illness, we will put it in the diagnosis, but we don't really have any official reporting system to track and identify those over time,” Moran said.  

The California Department of Public Health told the NBC4 I-Team it is in the planning phases of creating a statewide reporting system to streamline and collect data. They say emergency department data has an average delay of 6 to 12 months.   

Once that is updated, they say “...it is expected that participation from local emergency departments to increase based on ease of use and standardization...”  

Though they also add: “... the process does take some time to set up and implement...”  

“It's good to be familiar with what the patterns are so we can maybe try to recognize what those epidemiologic patterns are and maybe try and intervene to prevent it,” Moran said.  

• Moran suggests to stay cool: 
• Stay in the shade 
• Keep hydrated 
• Put cool towels or wash cloths on yourself and use a fan. He says this works the way our bodies naturally cool off through the evaporation of sweat.