Supporting Patients in Summer Heat

So the question, I'll repeat the question, what could you as a healthcare professional do to make your patients feel better coming up to summer? So I certainly think it's about being pragmatic in what we advise patients to do and what we expect from them. The summer we're having increasingly hot temperatures that we never probably had about 20 years ago and it's usually quite significantly increased temperatures. So I think it's certainly about finding ways to help patients to cope and you know be encouraging and motivating and give them good practical pragmatic advice and that being sensible about the things that they do. So you know it's the sort of normal advice if patients become a little bit depressed about that direct patients to helplines or any of the community services that are out there that help patients to maybe talk about things like mood, low mood, you know if they might be feeling a little bit depressed or you know but I think it's certainly about taking a pragmatic approach speaking to each patient individually you know it's a very short period of time that we have incredibly hot temperatures but it's seeing what's really bothering the patient about the hot weather or about moving into summer and then trying to maybe have a conversation with them around that. Sometimes it's not about doing anything physical or about just you know always having a solution at hand for the patients. Sometimes they just want to talk, they just want to offload and just giving them a hearing ear certainly makes a huge difference for them and for them to know that they have somebody who actually listens sometimes can be quite a significant thing for a patient. I think as I've said before because I have the privilege of seeing my patients quite regularly it gives me the opportunity to see what's going on with them and when I'm really concerned about patients we have a multidisciplinary team meeting which happens once or twice a week so there's often the opportunity to talk about things that concerns us about patients on a wider level and so we can get input from other professions and from other colleagues and if we need to further direct patients we were able to do that.