16th December 2024
Dear Layla Moran,
I write to you as the Chair of the UK Health Alliance on Climate Change, an alliance of 49-UK-based health organisations representing more than one million health professionals, most of the NHS workforce.
At current and predicted future scales of climate hazards, there is a risk that our health and care services may not always be functional in times of climate-related severe weather events which are likely to cause injury and harm human health. Examples of impacts include a sudden influx of patients during extreme weather events, damage to hospital infrastructure, degradation of other critical infrastructure that health services rely on, interruption of supply chains, and reduction in the health workforce due to physical, mental and emotional trauma.
Currently, there is a lack of understanding and certainty about the resilience of the UK’s health and care services to these threats.
We encourage the Health and Social Care Committee to complete an inquiry into the preparedness of health and care services to the threat of climate change.
The UK is already seeing the impacts of climate change, with higher summer temperatures and more severe storms. Summer temperatures above 25°C are likely to increase everywhere across the UK; the south of England will be particularly impacted. Extremely hot nights, which are currently rare in the UK, will become a more common occurrence. Urban centres in the south, particularly London, will be at increased risk. The likelihood of very hot summers with more heatwaves is predicted to be 50% more likely by 2050.
Heatwaves place additional pressure on NHS infrastructure, ambulance and services. The incidence of overheating at NHS sites in England has almost doubled in the last five years (from 2,980 recorded incidences in 2016-7 to 5,554 in 2021-22). These overheating periods have resulted in failure of essential equipment, disruption of IT and laboratory services, occupational health risk to staff, and the cancellation of surgical procedures.
Flooding is another significant climate change challenge facing the UK. Vulnerability to high rainfall events and widespread flooding poses danger to life, damage to infrastructure and travel disruption. Levels of daily rainfall and the risk of river flooding are expected to increase across the country.
Essential services like health and social care, as well as other critical infrastructure, are exposed to the increasing risk of flooding, which can lead to disruption and cancellation of services. At present, roughly 10% of UK hospitals are located in areas of significant flood risk, with a further 495 emergency services, 2474 GP surgeries and 2187 care homes at risk in England. Under both mild and more intense warming scenarios, the number of hospitals at risk is predicted to increase. In the year April 2021-March 2022, there were 176 incidents of flooding across NHS England sites, the majority of which occurred in general acute hospitals (sites that provide inpatient medical care and other services for surgery, acute medical conditions and injuries). The East of England and London were the worst affected.
The impacts on the health workforce are also significant, both through direct consequences such as inability to travel to work and indirectly through the longer term mental stresses.
The UK Health Alliance on Climate Change is currently working with a number of partners to develop a policy report on the resilience of the health system to these threats. Through this work, we have identified a current gap in knowledge of the preparedness of the system and feel this would be an important factor for the committee to consider through an inquiry.
We would be happy to support with this and share our own findings as we progress with research for our own report.
Kind regards
Richard Smith CBE, FMedSci
Chair, UK Health Alliance on Climate Change