Nurses ‘collapsing’ on shift amid scorching temperatures
- The Royal College of Nursing (RCN) has warned that nurses are collapsing while working in conditions exceeding 30C.
- RCN compiled a series of testimonies, including staff reporting broken air conditioning and a lack of ventilation.
- RCN chief executive and general secretary Professor Nicola Ranger said: “Swathes of the NHS and social care estate are in disrepair following decades of underinvestment and are utterly unprepared for extreme temperatures.”
- Meanwhile, director of the NHS Alliance ambulance and acute network, Matthew Hopkins, said on on the NHS Alliance’s Health on the Line podcast: “I think for a lot of our members that are running hospitals that are very old and where infrastructure’s really under pressure, many of those hospitals are carrying significant levels of backlog maintenance.”
- It comes after the health service has been told to prepare for the effects of heatwaves annually in the same way it plans for winter by Health Secretary Yvette Cooper.
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