The Effectiveness of Community Public Health Interventions in Alleviating the Health Impacts of High Temperatures

Abstract

This research aims to evaluate the performance of community public health interventions, to explore linkages between high temperature and health risks and ultimately to identify the effectiveness of community public health interventions in alleviating impacts of high temperatures on human health. Three separate analyses were performed for the research goals. Firstly, we developed indexes and criterions for quantitatively evaluating community public health interventions, and also evaluated the qualitative performance of the intervention programs using the self-evaluation of those who were in charge. Secondly, we estimated the association between high temperatures and health care utilization by using generalized additive models (GAMs) with non-parametric smoothing functions to describe nonlinear relations. Thirdly, the effectiveness of community public health interventions was evaluated by threshold temperature and RR for the association between high temperatures and health care utilization. The results suggested that high temperatures were associated with increased health care utilization among patients with heat-related illness, and generally nonlinear relations (J shaped) were observed. For heat-related illness, the estimated thresholds were on average high in communities among the high performance group. The high thresholds observed for the high performance communities might be attributed to an improved adaptation of local residents to heat, thanks to the public health interventions. However, there is a need to implement adaptation actions for focusing on vulnerable groups.