New Mexico health officials are warning that as summers grow longer and hotter, people living and working outside face mounting and often invisible risks.
Emergency department visits for heat stress have doubled since the early 2010s, said according to state data and epidemiologist Daniella Matthews-Trigg, program manager for the Mobile Homeless Response a Program which is a part of the New Mexico Department of Health Environmental Health Epidemiology Bureau.
New Mexico is not the only state realizing these increases. Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, and Wyoming public health reporting tracks heat-related emergency department data by overall population counts rather than housing status, making numbers more difficult to track. Reporting does, however, show dramatically increasing temperatures have impacted ER visits.
Arizona is the only state in the Mountain West that actively aggregates and publishes exact numbers specifically tracking unhoused emergency department visits for heat-related illness.
Unsheltered people are disproportionately represented in those ER visits, but Matthews-Trigg noted that tracking the problem remains difficult. While hospitals do collect addresses, homelessness isn’t consistently recorded, and there’s a dearth of federal data. Some progress is being made using “Z codes” in medical records that indicate homelessness, she added.
Last year, 761 unhoused people in New Mexico were treated for heat-related illness. By April of this year, the state had already logged 453 such cases. New Mexico is working on a method to track the effects of heat, specifically on the unhoused, according to Matthews-Trigg.
That data gap is one reason Matthews-Trigg and colleague Kelly Watson, communications specialist with the New Mexico Department of Health, helped launch the state’s Heat Safety Harm Reduction Campaign, aimed at people who spend long hours outdoors — especially those who are unsheltered or who use substances.
“Unsheltered people face a lot more of the elements and have far fewer tools to cool down,” Watson said. “What many residents take for granted — walking into an air-conditioned home or car — often isn’t an option. Those challenges stack on top of other risk factors like disability, chronic illness and social isolation.”
The campaign offers print and digital materials, as well as heat safety videos that explain how to recognize heat stroke and what to do while waiting for an ambulance. All materials, in English and Spanish, are available at nmharmreduction.org.
“We have a lot of community partners who already provide harm reduction services throughout the state, and are therefore working with a lot of these individuals that we're targeting as well,” Watson said.
A key message, Matthews-Trigg said, is that “anybody can be a helpful bystander” by calling 911, moving someone into shade, wetting their skin and fanning them in New Mexico’s dry air.
Matthews-Trigg framed the issue bluntly: “Homelessness is a public health crisis, and climate change is also a public health crisis.”
She hopes more collaboration — within New Mexico and across the region — will help communities better protect their unsheltered neighbors as the heat intensifies.
