1. Method identification |
• Identify possibly useful risk management tools (considering standard risk-management tools and health impact assessment tools), guidelines, and models. |
• Collect information helpful in assessing how well these risk-management tools, guidelines, and models fit the needs of the local context. |
• Establish a stakeholder reference group of multidisciplinary experts, from service providers to climate change scientists, to ensure regional knowledge translation and implementation. |
2. Method modification |
• Modify risk-management tool to include scope for collecting data on regional-level health risks and possible service developments under the 5 service development domains. |
• Use both quantitative and qualitative data-collection methods, supplementing quantitative data with observational case studies and interviews with local experts. |
• Use community consultation methods to ensure a focus on the needs of climate-vulnerable groups, such as children and older citizens as well as the socioeconomically disadvantaged. |
• Include scope to collect data on the wider pragmatic determinants of policy, such as strategic and economic considerations relevant to service development options. |
• Work with stakeholder groups to collect trial data and refine data-collection methods. |
3. Data collection |
• Implement tool through stakeholder reference group. |
• Involve a wide range of health and allied health services in data collection. |
• Include policymakers and others who can offer accounts of sociopolitical and economic barriers to implementation of any service adaptation options, as well as strategies for overcoming these barriers. |
• Collect a wide range of supplementary comparative information, such as known benefits and costs of different adaptation (and mitigation) responses in other systems (in other countries and in the same region). |
4. Development of data analyses |
• Analyze data to identify priority areas of risk and adaptation (as well as mitigation) under each of the 5 service development areas. |
• Use epidemiological and narrative analyses to obtain information-rich findings about the local context. |
• Invite the stakeholder reference group to review data analyses and provide information on likely lag times of any effects as well as bias introduced by participant populations. |
• Audit regional findings obtained in this way against local health plans and developments to determine which priorities need to be added to existing public health policies. |
• Analyze best-practice implications of regional findings in the light of existing guidelines and models for achieving adaptation and mitigation, to help decide what is best practice for this region. |
5. Development of service priorities |
• Develop a user-friendly, written regional impact statement with policy priorities, working with the stakeholder reference group to include: risks for identified groups; likelihood of specific negative (and positive) health outcomes; key health service adaptation and mitigation options for managing each risk, given under the 5 service development domains; cost-benefit analyses of each adaptation and mitigation option, including the costs of inaction; and strategic and political considerations important to the implementation success of the priority adaptation options. |