With the season’s first heat wave already scorching the Southwest with triple-digit temperatures, firefighters in Phoenix, America’s hottest big city, are using new tactics to try to save more lives in a county where 645 people died from heatstroke last year.
Earlier this season, the Phoenix Fire Department began an initiative to put heatstroke patients on ice on the way to area hospitals.
The medical technique, known as cold water immersion, is familiar to marathon runners and military personnel and has recently become a standard treatment at Phoenix hospitals, said Fire Chief John Plato.
Plato demonstrated his technique earlier this week outside the emergency department at Valleywise Health Medical Center in Phoenix, packing ice into an impermeable blue bag around a medical dummy meant to represent a patient.
He said the technology could dramatically reduce body temperature within a few minutes.
“Last week, we were able to resuscitate a critically ill patient before he even entered the emergency room,” Plato said. “Our goal is to improve the survival rate of our patients.”
To treat heatstroke, ice and man-sized soak bags are now standard equipment in all Phoenix Fire Department emergency vehicles.
It’s one of several measures the city has introduced this year as temperatures rise and the associated death toll increases.
For the first time this season, Phoenix is opening two cooling stations overnight.
Emergency responders across much of the region, from southeastern California to central Arizona, are bracing for what the National Weather Service said will be “by far the hottest” weather since last September.
Extreme heat warnings were in effect for parts of southern Nevada and Arizona from Wednesday morning through Friday evening, with highs expected to exceed 110 degrees Fahrenheit in Las Vegas and Phoenix.
The unseasonably hot weather is expected to spread northward and reach parts of the Pacific Northwest by the weekend.
Earlier this year, officials in Maricopa County, Arizona’s largest, were shocked when final figures showed 645 heatstroke deaths in the state, with the majority of those deaths in Phoenix.
The most severe heat wave, which saw temperatures reach or exceed 110 degrees Fahrenheit (43.4 degrees Celsius) for 31 days, claimed the lives of more than 400 people.
“We’ve seen a sharp increase in cases of severe heatstroke over the last three years,” said Dr. Paul Pugsley, director of emergency medicine at Valleywise Health. About 40% of those cases don’t survive.
Cooling patients long before they arrive at the emergency department could make a difference, he said.
“This technology has not been widely adopted in pre-hospital settings, either in non-military hospitals in the United States or among fire departments and paramedics,” Pugsley said.
Part of the reason may be a long-held perception that it’s impractical or impossible for emergency personnel and even hospitals to apply the technology to every case of heatstroke, he said.
Pugsley said he is aware of limited use of the technology in some locations, including Stanford Medical Center in Palo Alto, California, and Community Regional Medical Center in Fresno, California, as well as the San Antonio Fire Department in Texas.
Banner University Medical Center in Phoenix adopted the protocol last summer, said Dr. Aneesh Narang, associate director of emergency medicine at the center.
“This cold water immersion therapy is the standard of care in treating patients with heat stroke,” he said.
