Due to climate change, extreme weather events such as flooding are expected to increase in Germany in the future. This poses hidden risks to the healthcare system that have hardly been the focus of resilience planning to date: restrictions on access to hospitals and the supply of medical products due to flood-related traffic disruptions. This has been revealed by Germany-wide modelling carried out by Dr. Seth Bryant from the GFZ Helmholtz Centre for Geosciences and partners, which thus closes a significant gap in flood prevention. They used the GFZ's regional flood model and expanded it with algorithms that take into account flood spread at the level of transport routes and can simulate realistic detours and travel time delays. This also allows the impact on hospitals that are not directly affected by flooding to be determined. The study has been published in the journal Nature Communications Earth and Environment.

Severely injured patients are more likely to survive if they are initially treated by an emergency medical services (EMS) clinician who sees a high number of trauma patients, rather than a clinician in a quieter area even if they have been on the job longer, new research by UPMC and University of Pittsburgh surgeon-scientists reveals.