Physiotherapy Climate Stories by Physiotherapy Declares

High Wycombe

2023-11-02 10:15:20 UTC

On my final placement of my physiotherapy qualification I was working in a hyper acute stroke unit. During the six weeks I spent there the UK experienced record breaking high temperatures. It was scary to think that the strokes our patients were being admitted with, may have been caused by the heatwave. I struggled to work in the temperatures, feeling completely wiped out in a building not designed to cope with such heat. There were even some days when we weren't allowed to do any therapy with the patients because the risks of undertaking activity in the high temperatures outweighed the benefit. I had a brilliant time on this placement, but was definitely glad to no longer have to persevere working in the heat. I felt bad for my educators who had to keep on going and manage as best they could for the rest of the summer...

Isle of Wight

2023-11-02 10:28:21 UTC

I work as a physio in a regional spinal cord injury rehabilitation centre. Patients can come from anywhere in the whole of the south west of England and stay with us for months and months to rehabilitate from their injury before discharging into the community. It is often difficult for families and friends to visit regularly due to the significant journey times for some. Recently the family of one patient have really struggled with their journey from the Isle of Wight due to heavy flooding. This has increased their journey times significantly but more importantly has increased the stress and hassle associated with a visit, at an already very difficult time. The anxiety around this travel disruption for both the family and patient are evident in their moods when I see them for treatment. With more and more extreme weather conditions predicted as climate change progresses I wonder how this will affect patients rehabilitation and how we deliver our services?

Bath

2023-11-02 10:55:28 UTC

The overwhelming threat of the climate crisis has led me to take action both as an individual and in my work as a physio. Through this I have connected with a special group of other physio professionals who have similar concerns to me. Together we have built a supportive community from which I gain strength, reassurance and motivation to create positive change and promote sustainable physiotherapy practice in my workplace. Because of this community I feel more confident to have conversations with colleagues about the climate crisis. Also on the days I feel less hopeful I know there will always be someone to share my feelings with and I can be heard and understood.

This moving song "Unite to Survive" (track 8) reminds me of the supportive community I have found 💚💙💚 I first heard it performed live when I was protesting for climate action with other physios in Bath.

Southwark, London

2023-11-02 16:31:19 UTC

Summer 2022 in the UK saw yet another summer of unprecedented temperatures. Many will be familiar with the news story of Guys & St Thomas’s hospital, a central London teaching Trust whose two main IT servers went into literal meltdown, unable to adapt to the increasing temperatures.

This affected every area of clinical care, from cancelled surgeries and procedures in the acute sites, to an inability to access basic patient demographics or notes in the community.

This in turn meant our community Paediatric physios (and numerous other clinical staff groups) could not visit patients at home as planned for essential therapy (and also could not access numbers to warn patients!). We had no idea who was turning up to outpatient appointments and with no access to medical records we could not access key medical information or safeguarding alerts. Our record keeping had to be done on word documents on our personal computers as there was initially no access to shared drives, so we had no way of seeing other HCP entries who were working with very vulnerable families.

This doesn’t even scratch the surface of the health impacts the heatwaves had on our vulnerable patients, and the therapy they missed resultantly.

The IT systems were not fully remedied for months, and the repercussions of migrating data and missing data are inevitably still being felt but not talked about widely.

The environmental degradation and biodiversity crises are a public health crisis. People and patients are suffering, and the physiotherapy profession is unable to deliver the care required to the people who need it most as a result.

Blandford Forum

physiotherapydeclares — 2023-11-06 14:05:21 UTC

I'm Kelly and I have MS. In 2022 the prolonged heatwaves had a negative impact on me. I was very fatigued, it stopped all my muscles working. Being fatigued meant that I couldn't exercise. I also wasn't able to sleep which impacted on my ability to recharge and recover. The heat was so prolonged that I had no time to recover so I was always running on empty. This meant that my walking ability was terrible and my foot drop and hip stability deteriorated. It's taken me 12 months to get 50 % recovered from this.

Plymouth, UK

2023-11-09 18:30:18 UTC

Devon based Trusts (Plymouth & Exeter) have established a rewards scheme to encourage staff to reduce-reuse-recycle, travel sustainably, improve health and wellbeing and upload activities to a leaders board to share good practice and motivate and enable colleagues to get involved.

Bronglais General Hospital, Aberystwyth

2023-11-14 21:06:38 UTC

Summer 2022 heatwave, record temperature of 40C here in UK. Most of the rehabilitation, especially of the elderly patients on the ward had to be cancelled over a period of 2 weeks because patients could not cope with the heat. Disruption in service and patients care including delayed recovery and prolonged hospital staying. It felt surreal!