“Horrific, horrendous, unbearable, unsafe.” That’s how medical professionals describe the impact of this year’s heat waves 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, according to accounts shared with Bloomberg News.
The past few months have revealed the extent to which Britain’s healthcare system appears unprepared for the profound change in climate already underway. Britain’s hospitals and care homes were set up “with a core assumption that the climate was going to be stable,” says 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.”
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,” says 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.
Matt Lee, a resident doctor and sustainability lead at the Doctors’ Association UK who shared details of the June surv-ey, says members are 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. 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.
Yvette Cooper, UK’s health and social care secretary, said in an emailed response to a requ-est for comment that NHS staff are “doing a remarkable job” in light of the extreme heat. In Eng-land, the NHS faces a £15.9 bill-ion ($21.5 billion) bill to make overdue fixes needed to return buildings to a minimum acceptable standard, according to its own disclosures. Wales and Sco-tland have maintenance backlogs of about £1 billion each.
