At a Paris-region hospital, emergency medics needed it to plunge patients into cold-water baths to speedily bring down their temperatures so they wouldn’t join the growing tally of dead from a record-smashing heat wave. But lacking an ice-making machine, where to get it?
A fast-food restaurant helped out last week, saying the hospital could take its ice. Staff also bought ice from the supermarket. The Paris-Saclay Hospital has now ordered its own ice machine, eagerly awaited in the emergency department for a future attack of sizzling heat.
Whether that hits next week, as France’s weather service says it might, or in summer months ahead, medics and hospital administrators are acutely aware that the battle they’ve just endured will, because of climate change, be followed by others. Just as they brace for the annual flu season, they know that fighting heat waves is becoming their new normal.
So as they catch their breath from what the director of the public hospital described as a “horrible” last week, he and his staff are also gearing up for the next round.
“We thought we were ready. We were not actually,” said the director, Cédric Lussiez.
“The hospital was working on a 24 hours a day basis because we had to find new solutions in a very short delay,” he said. “We already learned some lessons.”
Efforts to plug some of the holes exposed by the heat wave that shifted eastward to other parts of Europe after battering France, the United Kingdom and other countries are accelerating on a national level, too.
When France was baking through its hottest days on record last week, French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu announced a 100-million euro ($114-million) spend from this summer on cooling systems for hospitals and other work to keep wards functioning.
And at the latest in a series of heat-wave crisis meetings, he said Monday that the government is buying 30,000 air-conditioning units for health facilities, with the first deliveries expected “at the end of the week, beginning of next week.”
“It’s an absolute priority for us that, if the heat wave returns, the hospital situation be a lot less strained,” he said.
The World Health Organisation on Tuesday described the heat wave as “a dress rehearsal” for summers that “will be harder.”
“Europe is warming at more than twice the global average. Heat waves are no longer one-off freak events,” it said. “Every summer we fail to prepare for them is a summer we pay for in lives.”
