People living in affordable housing units who rely on home medical devices (HMDs) will need continued access to power as climate-related outages increase, according to a new report from Yale University and Operation Fuel, a Hartford-based nonprofit that provides energy assistance to residents.
Climate change is causing more power outages in the United States, according to the nonprofit Climate Central, and that makes it harder for people to maintain access to their nebulizers, dialysis and CPAP machines. Those with motorized wheelchairs, ventilators, oxygen concentrators and suction pumps are also at risk.
“We heard from many, many people of having to rely on the emergency services to take them to the hospital where they're essentially taking up a bed simply because they can plug their device in,” said Annie Harper, assistant professor of psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine, who worked on the report.
The researchers surveyed 94 participants in 23 sites statewide, including New Haven, Bridgeport, Hartford, Middletown and Windsor. Most residents lived in affordable housing units located in census tracts that are underserved, as indicated by the Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool, CEJST, or were designated as distressed municipalities as defined by the Connecticut Department of Economic and Community Development.
The next step is to tap into federal funding to get climate-smart technology in affordable housing units statewide, said Darlene Yule, chief operating officer at Operation Fuel.
Back-up solar power and battery storage can help patients stay connected to their devices when the power goes out, and home weatherization can better insulate where people live as our planet gets warmer.
Harper said the definition of what counts as a home medical device must also be expanded.
“It's refrigerators, it's elevators, it's also air conditioners,” Harper said. “Interestingly, we heard that for people with diabetes, actually maintaining air temperature is as important as refrigerating medication. People who use electricity-dependent devices for monitoring their health and for communicating with their medical providers, so the phone becomes a home medical device.”
The majority of survey respondents said they depend on more than one medical device, a significant financial burden.
In Connecticut, 2% of Eversource and 2.4% of Avangrid customers receive medical hardship protection — nearly 30,000 customers, of which almost 90% have life-threatening conditions, the report said. This allows residents earning low incomes, and those who rely on electricity to treat a serious medical condition, to avoid having their electricity shut off even if they fall behind on their bills.
But researchers said those numbers — the nearly 30,000 covered — may be underestimating the number of people dependent on HMDs.
“Close to 22,000 of Connecticut’s 736,000 Medicare beneficiaries ... rely on electricity-dependent medical equipment,” the report said, citing external data from Empower. “And even this source only provides data for certain types of ‘common electricity-dependent medical equipment’ and does not include HMD types that we heard are important to people such as refrigeration or heating/cooling.”
The majority of survey respondents said they used more than one medical device, and were not the only HMD user in their household.
The report was a collaboration between the Yale School of Medicine, the Yale Center on Climate Change and Health and Operation Fuel.
