“Horrific, horrendous, unbearable, unsafe.”
That is how medical professionals describe the impact of this year’s heatwaves on Britain’s healthcare system, in response to a survey by the Doctors’ Association UK.
In hospitals built for a cooler climate, staff are now dealing with patients too sweaty to receive intravenous drips, medication at risk of degrading in high temperatures and colleagues collapsing on the job with heat fatigue.
The past few months have revealed the extent to which Britain’s healthcare system appears unprepared for the profound change in climate already under way. The fear now is that temperatures are rising too fast for the UK to adapt.
Britain’s hospitals and care homes were set up “with a core assumption that the climate was going to be stable”, said Nick Watts, the former chief sustainability officer of the National Health Service (NHS) in England. “That’s just turned out to not be a good assumption.”

Vulnerable to overheating
Some 90 per cent of England’s hospital buildings are vulnerable to overheating, according to the UK Health Alliance on Climate Change. The upgrades needed “are pretty expensive,” said Watts, who now runs the Centre for Sustainable Medicine, a research institute in Singapore.
“The budget of the NHS and the capital allocations for the NHS were never intended to cover this sort of cost,” he said.
Extreme heat is now challenging almost every corner of Britain’s infrastructure.
On Thursday, bus drivers in London announced strikes over the coming months because they were sick of enduring heatwaves without air conditioning. Banks including JPMorgan Chase & Co. have allowed workers to stay home as un-air-conditioned rides on London’s Underground become unbearable. Train tracks are buckling and schools have had to close.
Last month, the London Fire Brigade received a record of 27,580 emergency calls. During one of the heatwaves in June, the London Ambulance Service fielded over 53,000 calls, surpassing the number received when the Covid-19 pandemic was at its height in March 2020.
Matt Lee, a resident doctor and sustainability lead at the Doctors’ Association UK who shared details of the June survey, said members were voicing “concerns about patient safety.”

In the survey, 83 per cent of NHS staff described their workplace as “very hot” or “dangerously hot” in the June heatwave. More than two-thirds said the heat had affected patient safety.
Conditions are “inhumane”, the Royal College of Nursing said on Thursday. It cited examples of members physically buckling under the strain.
One nurse working in an unventilated ward ended up needing emergency treatment at the same hospital after collapsing from dehydration. Another said that hospital management had banned fans and portable air-conditioning units because of problems with the electrical supply.
Yvette Cooper, the UK’s health and social care secretary, said NHS staff were “doing a remarkable job” in light of the extreme heat.
“But I have also been clear that the NHS now needs to plan for summer pressures in the way we currently plan for winter pressures,” she said. “That includes making sure buildings are more resilient in these new extreme heat conditions as well as responding to additional patient needs.”
Budget constraints
Britain’s health service, which is paid for through taxation, is already struggling to keep up with demand due to outdated facilities and infrastructure after decades of underinvestment. In England, the NHS faces a £15.9 billion (US$21.5 billion) bill to make overdue fixes needed to return buildings to a minimum acceptable standard, according to its own disclosures. Wales and Scotland have maintenance backlogs of about £1 billion each.
In 2024, an independent review of the NHS found a £37 billion shortfall in capital investment in England’s health service, relative to spending in peer countries during the 2010s. That has resulted in disruption to services in “crumbling buildings”, 20 per cent of which predate the founding of the nationalised health service in 1948.
As Britain’s healthcare workers wait for upgrades, they are struggling to protect their patients.
Fiona Brennan, a consultant anaesthetist working in Cardiff, south Wales, said the conditions she experienced during Britain’s June heatwave were “far worse” than during the Covid pandemic of 2020.

In the hottest week of June, she was part of a team carrying out radiology surgeries, which are procedures for patients suffering from cancer, stroke and other potentially life-threatening conditions.
Surgeries are normally carried out in a room with less than 60 per cent humidity and temperatures of about 20 degrees Celsius (68 degrees Fahrenheit) to reduce the risk of infection, says Brennan.
“We were up to 27 degrees and humidity was really high,” she said. “We were wearing lead coats, and that’s a weight. It’s heavy. I was literally sat dripping in sweat. It was absolutely miserable. I felt really sick.”
At those temperatures, basic procedures become much more difficult.
Intravenous cannulas were not sticking to one patient because of the sweat, Brennan said. “Everything was peeling off” and “we were just constantly having to keep looking at them and making sure they weren’t slipping out. I think that alone is such a patient safety issue.”
Clare Wade, director of nursing for the surgery clinical board at Cardiff and Vale University Health Board, said in a statement that the hospital was looking at installing window film in heavily glazed buildings and improving air conditioning availability in the worst-affected areas.
“We fully recognise that many colleagues worked in extremely difficult conditions during the recent period of exceptional heat,” she said.
Less urgent operations and procedures were postponed to keep patients safe. At the end of June, the University Hospitals Sussex NHS Foundation Trust said that “challenges maintaining safe temperatures in some of our hospital theatres and certain facilities” meant appointments had to be delayed.
The Royal College of Physicians said doctors were experiencing “severe, unsustainable pressure” from heat. In one case, according to the group, a member said machinery used to treat cancer was failing due to the heat, as were the hospital’s IT servers.
‘Insanely hot’
Staff are working in buildings that are difficult to blind and ventilate, with blinds that are broken and windows that barely open, according to the Doctors’ Association UK.
Its June survey included reports of doctors who were not able to switch off radiators even as temperatures soared above 30 degrees. Less than 5 per cent of respondents said they had consistent access to air conditioning.
Leah Hazard, a midwife working in Scotland, said her unit was windowless. “Many hospitals in the NHS estate are not designed to have really efficient central ventilation,” she said.
“If the temperature in one of these hospitals rises from 25 degrees to 30 degrees, it’s not just like things get a bit tougher. Everybody gets a lot sicker, everybody gets much more dehydrated, more stressed, more uncomfortable, so it’s like a magnifying effect.”
Midwives generally were not free to control the temperature in the wards in which they work, and in some cases they were not even allowed to open windows or use fans, Hazard said.
“We need windows that open. We need fans and air-conditioning units,” she said. But “a lot of midwives and nurses are still being told that it’s unprofessional to drink on the shop floor, to have water or a mug at the desk”.

This is not the first year in which extreme heat has upended Britain’s ability to care for its most vulnerable citizens.
Jane Dennett-Thorpe, whose father Sid was dying in a specialist home for older people in Cambridge in August last year, said she was stunned by the temperatures he was expected to endure. “It was insanely hot,” she said.
For more than a week, she sat with her father in a south-facing room worrying about how to keep him cool. The building had no fans or air conditioning, so she bought a fan herself from a local electronics store.
Dennett-Thorpe, a civil servant who works in the energy sector, said that as a result, her final moments with her father were tainted by “stress and discomfort” that “made me not think about those 10 days as a peaceful passing”.
Extreme heat ultimately risked leaving medical professionals too unwell to look after patients, Hazard said.
“Staff go off sick, or they burn out and they leave,” she said. “If we’re going to have more periods of extreme heat in the coming years, then it would behove the government and individual health boards to start planning for this.”

Original source: hk