\n<\/p>\n
\u201cThe big thing A&E doctors are seeing during extreme heat now is falls in the elderly,\u201d says Dr Adrian Boyle, an A&E consultant at Addenbrooke\u2019s hospital in Cambridge.<\/p>\n
\u201cDuring this summer\u2019s five heatwaves I\u2019ve seen elderly people get light-headed and dizzy and fall down a whole flight of stairs and break multiple bones, purely because of the heat. The last fall down stairs because of the heat resulted in multiple broken ribs, a wrist and her lower leg.<\/p>\n
\u201cThese are often elderly people who are taking diuretics \u2013 water tablets, to get rid of body fluid \u2013 or drugs for high blood pressure. It\u2019s a good thing, most of the time, to be taking them.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut in this weather, that can make people feel very, very light-headed quickly. We\u2019re seeing lots of people who feel very dizzy, some of whom have fallen over and hurt themselves as a consequence.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m struck by how quickly such accidents happen and how long they take to get over. A wrist fracture can take a couple of months and a broken hip or lower leg more than six months.\u201d<\/p>\n
Boyle, who was president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine from 2022 to 2025, is reflecting on the growing impact of unusually high temperatures on the health of the population and on the NHS, which treats the illness and injuries that extreme heat causes.<\/p>\n
He is talking on Thursday as the UK records the hottest day \u2013 38.1C (100.6F) \u2013 of a year in which the first two heatwaves alone, in May and June, together caused 2,877 deaths, according to UK Health Security Agency estimates \u2013 almost double the 1,504 heat-related deaths it recorded during the whole of 2025.<\/p>\n
Figures published by NHS England on Thursday pinpointed July\u2019s two heatwaves as a key reason why a record 2.5 million people attended A&E that month. They included people whose breathing problems and other underlying health conditions were exacerbated by the heat, it said.<\/p>\n
\u201cExtreme heat causes other problems too,\u201d says Boyle. \u201cI\u2019ve seen a lot of older people end up in kidney failure because of dehydration. Also, the heat pushes some young people to go swimming in unsuitable and unsupervised rivers where they drown.<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople taking medication for severe mental illness can also be at increased risk as their medication can leave them unable to recognise that they\u2019re getting hot.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd hot people stuck in the back of an ambulance outside an emergency department, who are already ill, can get either heat exhaustion or heatstroke as a result. Heatstroke is very dangerous.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur hospitals and ambulances are just not set up to look after people in the heat. There is minimal air conditioning in many of our hospital rooms, so ill people are being made hot and this just can\u2019t be good for them.<\/p>\n
\u201cLying on wipeable plastic mattresses in this weather is also very unpleasant, even on top of an ordinary sheet, as they get sweaty quickly.\u201d<\/p>\n
skip past newsletter promotionFree newsletter | Every weekday<\/p>\n
Sign up to First Edition<\/span><\/p>\n Our morning email breaks down the key stories of the day, telling you what\u2019s happening and why it matters<\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n <\/span>A nurse in full PPE. Certain infections require that nurses and doctors don bulky protective wear \u2013 an unhappy task in extreme hot weather. <\/span> Photograph: Victoria Jones\/PA<\/p>\n Dr Zuzanna Sawicka, a consultant in elderly medicine and the Royal College of Physicians\u2019 clinical director for patient safety and clinical standards, highlights a challenge that extreme heat poses for staff rather than patients.<\/p>\n A doctor going in to visit a patient with an infectious disease has to wear full personal protective equipment, like they did during the Covid-19 pandemic.<\/p>\n \u201cIt can be quite stifling and it compromises how long you can stay with a patient because you generally start to feel sick and not so great because you\u2019re so warm and there\u2019s just no [air] circulation.<\/p>\n \u201cI saw a case this week of reactivation of tuberculosis. We have to then put on a tight-fitting mask and a full gown until you know whether it is or isn\u2019t. You\u2019re in your own clothes, already sweating, and then on top of that you have to essentially put on full PPE,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n The risk of infections also helps explain why so few hospitals have proper ventilation, air conditioning or fans, Sawicka explains \u2013 in case they unwittingly spread bugs.<\/p>\n Jean (not her real name), a nurse at a London hospital, reports: \u201cWe have some fans, but not enough for all the patients. So there have been problems and patients fighting over them. It\u2019s high time that we got some AC for everyone so that patients aren\u2019t fighting each other.\u201d<\/p>\n Their uniforms can also make already sweaty nurses feel even hotter, Jean adds. \u201cAll our uniform is so thick [that] we\u2019re sweating so much. We\u2019ve been asking management for a long time for lighter uniforms for us, but they\u2019ve not done that.<\/p>\n \u201cSome of us are getting lighter uniforms from friends who have spare kit or even having to buy lighter uniforms ourselves.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cThe big thing A&E doctors are seeing during extreme heat now is falls in the elderly,\u201d says Dr Adrian Boyle, an A&E consultant at Addenbrooke\u2019s hospital in Cambridge. \u201cDuring this summer\u2019s five heatwaves I\u2019ve seen elderly people get light-headed and dizzy and fall down a whole flight of stairs and break multiple bones, purely because<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":51776,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[24974,335,37,5117,15940,1229,364,1299,2975],"class_list":{"0":"post-51775","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-health","8":"tag-dizzy","9":"tag-feel","10":"tag-health","11":"tag-heatwaves","12":"tag-lots","13":"tag-nhs","14":"tag-people","15":"tag-peoples","16":"tag-toll"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51775","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=51775"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51775\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/51776"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=51775"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=51775"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=51775"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}