Health chiefs are warning of the impact the heatwave is having on services as they face significantly more life-threatening emergency calls with record-breaking temperatures continuing to scorch the country.
Dr Hilary Williams, clinical vice-president of the Royal College of Physicians, told Today the intense heat exposes how poor the infrastructure of the health service is.
“When you go round hospitals, very, very few hospitals are new,” she said. “We’ve kind of bolted things in car parks, we’ve added an extra wing on here, we’ve changed a corridor into a ward, and those places just aren’t coping with the demands of extreme heat.
“The patients are far too hot. We’re hearing reports of elderly care wards way over 30C.”
Dr Williams also said some critical machinery, such as MRI scanners and linear accelerators that treat cancer, have gone down due to the heat.