Governing the Climate Adaptation of Care Settings: Participatory Workshop Transcripts, 2022-2024

The two online participatory workshops were organised as part of the ClimaCare project (www.climacare.org). The project aimed to provide evidence and insights to help strengthen the resilience of care provision to rising temperatures, and enhance our understanding of individual behaviours, organisational capacity and governance to enable the UK's care provision to develop equitable adaptation pathways. The participatory workshops specifically aimed to investigate the causes of overheating in the care sector and to develop appropriate solutions, by obtaining a better understanding of the underlying system structure and identifying effective places to intervene in the system. Both focus group sessions comprised of a multidisciplinary stakeholder platform, involving experts from the built environment, social care, and public health policy. The first workshop addressed the actions currently taken in response to overheating, their ownership and governance, as well as the possible solutions relating to building design and adaptation, and behavioural, operational and social factors. The participants were initially presented with a simple Causal Loop Diagram (CLD), based on preliminary findings from the ClimaCare project, that differentiated between fundamental and symptomatic solutions. Following the joint modification of the initial CLD and the joint search for solutions, an extended structure depicting the complex interactions and mechanisms that drive overheating and climate adaptation emerged. The second workshop built on the first to identify additional cross-domain interconnections, map evidence in relation to the strength of relationships, and prioritise the variables and relationships deemed to have the highest scale of impact.