The Royal College of Nursing has warned that nurses are collapsing during shifts as temperatures inside hospitals exceed 30C, with the union blaming decades of underinvestment in NHS buildings for leaving staff and patients dangerously exposed to extreme heat.
The Royal College of Nursing (RCN) has warned that nurses are collapsing while working in hospital conditions exceeding 30C, as extreme summer heat exposes deep-rooted problems in NHS infrastructure. The union compiled a series of staff testimonies describing broken air conditioning, poor ventilation and dangerously high temperatures on wards. RCN chief executive and general secretary Professor Nicola Ranger said the findings reflect the state of much of the NHS estate: “Swathes of the NHS and social care estate are in disrepair following decades of underinvestment and are utterly unprepared for extreme temperatures.”
What staff are reporting
According to the RCN’s testimonies, nurses working through the current heatwave have described becoming physically unwell during shifts, with some reportedly collapsing as a result of the extreme temperatures. The accounts point to broken air conditioning systems and inadequate ventilation as recurring problems across affected sites.
Hospital wards can, in some circumstances, become considerably hotter than the outside temperature, a consequence of large windows, heat-generating medical equipment, poor airflow and limited or non-functioning air conditioning. For staff, extended exposure to such conditions raises the risk of dehydration, dizziness, exhaustion and reduced concentration, all of which can increase the likelihood of mistakes during demanding clinical work.
An ageing NHS estate under pressure
The problem appears to be particularly acute in older NHS buildings, many of which carry significant backlogs of maintenance work and were never designed to cope with prolonged periods of extreme heat. Speaking on the NHS Alliance’s Health on the Line podcast, Matthew Hopkins, director of the NHS Alliance’s ambulance and acute network, highlighted the scale of the challenge facing hospital managers. “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,” he said.
The RCN’s central argument is that while NHS organisations are already expected to have heatwave plans in place, many hospital buildings simply lack the physical infrastructure needed to put those plans into practice effectively. In the union’s view, keeping hospitals safely operational during extreme weather requires sustained investment in the buildings themselves, rather than relying on staff alone to manage rising temperatures.
Risk to patients as well as staff
The impact of extreme heat extends well beyond hospital staff. Older people, babies, people with cardiovascular or respiratory conditions, and seriously ill patients are all considered particularly vulnerable to high temperatures. Extreme heat can also place additional strain on hospitals more broadly, contributing to a rise in emergency admissions linked to dehydration, cardiovascular problems and respiratory illness.
The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) uses a system of heat-health alerts to warn health and social care services when temperatures are expected to pose an increased risk to vulnerable people, giving services advance notice to prepare where possible.
Calls for year-round heat planning
The warnings come after Health Secretary Yvette Cooper called on the NHS to prepare for the effects of heatwaves on an annual basis, treating summer heat resilience with the same level of planning the health service applies to winter pressures each year. As the UK experiences increasingly frequent periods of extreme summer heat, the RCN’s intervention adds weight to calls for the NHS to shift from treating heatwaves as exceptional, one-off events toward building lasting resilience into hospital infrastructure itself.
For the RCN, the concern extends beyond staff discomfort: as extreme heat becomes a more regular feature of UK summers, decades of unresolved maintenance issues risk leaving hospitals increasingly vulnerable to conditions they were never built to withstand.
