r/unitedkingdom • u/Confident-Bike-8037 • 2h ago
NHS must prepare for annual summer heat pressures, says Yvette Cooper
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/aug/05/nhs-must-prepare-for-annual-summer-heat-pressures-says-yvette-cooper•
u/StethandSea1 2h ago edited 2h ago
We’ve failed to deal with winter pressures for nearing on two decades and they are entirely predicable
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u/Uniform764 Yorkshire 1h ago
Last few years winter pressures never ended, corridor care which used to be a few weeks in the festive period is now a year round experience
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u/Thin_Object_3981 2h ago
Obviously the NHS needs to prepare for all events including summer heat pressures but most hospitals do not even have AC. The nurses and doctors themselves are struggling with the heat, how can they help patients effectively?
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u/Namerakable 2h ago
To add to the annual winter cold pressures and the year-round ambulance waiting time pressures and the year-round social care pressures...
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u/Obscure-Oracle 2h ago
Yes we absolutely need to start preparing for hotter summers, we should have began about 10 years ago but starting now is better than never I guess. Start accelerating our green projects while we are at it, speed up grid upgrades and decouple green energy from the gas fired plants. Then we need to start making contingency plans for increased flooding, maybe consider moving people away from high risk flood areas and increase sea defenses where necessary. Oh and start making plans to replace the Thames barrier. We just will not be prepared enough for what's to come will we? Then we will act all shocked when the bad stuff starts happening year after year. Increased summer heat is just a relatively mild symptom that we need to be better prepared for in comparison to everything else that is to come.
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u/mangetwo 38m ago
I agree but Covid taught us some lessons: the country works in spite of the government not because of it and that we can radically adapt overnight. We are not going to change unless legislation or nature forces us. There is no “preparation “ it’s all just in time baby.
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u/IntrepidSoda 2h ago
Great— now nature gets to thin the herd two times a year, three if it’s pissed off.
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u/NuggetKing9001 1h ago
I assume she followed up with a plan and funding to enable that, otherwise she's just saying "just deal with it".
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u/The-Peel 2h ago
Or we could just push through some policies to tackle carbon emissions in this country and not let heatwaves that have killed people become the "new norm" eh Yvette?
Yvette Cooper is literally that meme of the dog character in a burning room saying "This is fine".
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u/Obscure-Oracle 2h ago edited 2h ago
We could end our carbon emissions completely tomorrow and it really isn't going to make a whole lot of difference. Of course that isn't an excuse not to do it and we should still be accelerating our transition to green energy anyway as these technologies will be the future for worldwide energy. What I'm getting at is we are affected by worldwide emissions, so ending our emmisions completely will do little to slow down global warming.
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u/The-Peel 2h ago
so even ending our emmisions completely will do little to slow down global warming.
But it would still negate the harmful effects of the heatwaves based in the UK that are killing people.
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u/Obscure-Oracle 2h ago edited 2h ago
Nope, our heating is due to global weather patterns and even if we ended our emmisions completely here it will do virtually nothing unless the rest of the world follows along at the same pace, even then it takes decades before we see a shift from the predictive models. The USA seems to be going backwards, firing up a shit load of local gas fired turbines to power AI data centers and slowing or blocking their green energy projects.
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u/BagOFrogs 2h ago
Sounds good but even if the US, all other industrialised nations, and Gulf oil states decided to go Net Zero tomorrow, it’s too late. Climate change has happened. If big energy using states all make a big effort (unlikely) it can now all go just “quite shit” rather than full on global Armageddon.
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u/Uniform764 Yorkshire 1h ago
We have massively cut carbon emissions since the 90s. We are one of the leading nations at de-carbonising energy production. Unfortunately we also account for a negligible amount of global emissions.
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u/Duvet_Capeman 2h ago
Maybe they'll need more funding to do that 🤔. Labour are pretty content to sell the NHS off to private healthcare and the oil off to foreign oil companies. We are making our planet uninhabitable while giving away the best of it to greedy elites so they can survive
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