Dementia sufferers in the Bath area were discovered with coats and the heating on during some of the hottest weather Britain has ever experienced.
Suzanne Westhead, the director of adult social care at Bath and North East Somerset Council, said that the care service had faced its “busiest summer ever” in 2026. Five separate heatwaves between May and August saw the country experience its highest ever temperatures.
This was a particular danger to vulnerable people already relying on care, as council care workers discovered when visiting people. Ms Westhead said: “A number of those people had dementia and couldn’t regulate their own body heat. A number of them had jackets/coats on or in some cases had the heating on.”
She said that there had been unexpected deaths over the summer, particularly in the earlier part of the year. Ms Westhead was speaking at a meeting of the council’s health and wellbeing board, a powerful body made up of councillors, leaders from local NHS bodies, charities, and the police and fire services, on September 3.
One major role of the body is to coordinate multi-agency “winter planning” each year, as health and care services prepare to face higher demand over the expected period of cold weather. Now they are considering meeting to carry out “summer planning” too.
The chair of the board, councillor Paul May (Publow with Whitchurch, Liberal Democrat), said: “I think we could probably do it better in the future if we had the opportunity to plan.”
Avon Fire and Rescue Service area manager Steve Quinton told the board: “I have done 29 and a half years now and this is one of the busiest periods of time I have ever seen in relation to this.”
By John Wimperis, Local Democracy Reporter