To think UKHSA should have issued better advice in advance of the current extreme weather

[ProudCat]

First up, I'm a secondary teacher. Secondly, my adult son is severely disabled and hugely impacted by the current extreme weather. Thirdly, there was no such thing as the blitz mentality of 'keep calm and carry on' - it was pretty much a propaganda invention and a very good one at that.

Yesterday, I logged on to the Met Office's app to see that temperatures and feels like where I live were higher than temperatures and feels like where my family live, but I was under an amber heat alert and they were under a red heat alert. This changed at 9am in the morning, after the schools had opened. So that's my first issue, because it seems as if the heat alerts had followed any sort of logic (i.e. a certain temperature and feels like produces a certain heat alert) we wouldn't have ended up evacuating at lunch time. Heat alerts are put in place by UKHSA.

My second issue is that this was foreseen. We all knew at the weekend that there would be a significant rise in temperatures, most likely record breaking. Why could the UKHSA not have taken a logical approach at this time. For example, if temperature are going to reach 35 degrees, then we will definitely need to operate under a business recovery plan. Instead of doing this, they prevaricated, leaving people unclear, especially local authorities and school academies, who ended up having to make the call according to common sense rather than solid government-led guidance. This isn't good enough. Everyone was literally waiting to be told exactly what the guidance was and it never came through. This led to last minute decisions and disruption for families (in the case of education). What's the point of a huge organisation like the UKHSA if it's not actually able to carry out the function of its role in a timely manner.

Finally, it concerns me that decisions about public health, which should be coordinated by a health agency, are being made locally and piecemeal. This shouldn't be happening. In an 'industry' - such as education - there should be standing risk assessments and identified control measures already in place, and these should be informed by the appropriate public body. It shouldn't be left to individual schools to 'make it up as they go along' in the total absence of proper guidance from the LA - who themselves are at a bit of a loss because they haven't got any guidance either. Instead, we have (understandably) disgruntled parents and carers who suddenly find their lives upended with last minute notifications that they're struggling to respond to.

Come on UKHSA, get your act together.

See, I've been challenged as to whether I understand what a forecast is. I do. The forecast didn't change. If the forecast remains the same, why does the alert change? The forecast was there 3 days before.

All schools have to have a health and safety policy, as indeed do all businesses. Legal liability rests with the employee, but day to day responsibility is delegated to managment, and in the case of schools that’s usually the head’s responsibility. So of course the head is the one who should make the decision.

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The UKHSA has only existed since 2021. Suggesting plans isn't quite the same as ensuring plans. And those suggested plans aren't for the exceptional conditions we've seen. Hence why the government had to reissue advice this week. And even that advice was based on the premiss that it was manageable and it turned out not to be.

I didn't say there should be a blanket rule. In fact I've now said over and over again that there should be a series of conditions. I've already said: if a school has air conditioning (x) then it may be able to stay open (y). I'm not sure what you're misunderstanding here.

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This is exactly it! One child's carer receives cascading info. Easy to manage. 1,000+ pupils in a secondary and a school nurse for 3 hours once every 2 weeks, not easy to manage.

Nope, the exact same forecasted temperature was there for 3 days beforehand. And this is my issue. If the UKHSA are making decisions when they come into work on the day, that's too late. Nothing had changed for 3 days.

Re: the authority to make decisions. That authority was obviously there for the red warning, but as you point out, that red warning looks like it wasn't put in place until someone, in the agency that's meant to be ahead of the curve to respond to public health emergencies, finally turned up at work on the day. So you seem to be saying heads should make their decisions in the absence of information from the UKHSA? Interesting.

Not sure what your confusion is. The Met Office forecast the weather. UKHSA is the public body responsible for keeping the public safe in a health emergency. I'd say 'risk to life' is a health emergency. I'm not talking about general weather, I'm talking about how the public body, whose sole remit is to manage health, did it's job properly. Unless, of course, you think that the Local Authority and every head in the city made a mistake and that's what lead to emergency evacuations of every secondary.

Forecasts for the weather have changed across the country daily as the week progressed, for temperature, wind speed and humidity. In general the peak in temperature moved later in the week, and humidity increased. Night time temperatures have generally been higher than forecast as well. What would be interesting is to know whereabouts in the country the forecast has remained completely unchanged!

As for authority only existing for red alerts, that’s nonsense and not how delegated authority works at all. I do believe that there are heads that didn’t do things quickly enough, I don’t believe that there is a head that has no authority to make a decision based on facts, regardless of whatever national alert level is in place.

Nope, the exact same forecasted temperature was there for 3 days beforehand

In this case maybe (be interesting to see the details) but in any event forecasts do often change.

I don't think it's genetally reasonable to expect the authorities to make significant decisions that may have major implications for many people 72 or even 48 hours ahead of a postulated weather event ...what they can do is give a general warning and remind the local SMEs (e.g. school heads) to have a think about what might be appropriate for their location if the forecast holds.

Once you get inside 24 or even 12 hours then it might be appropriate to firm up the warnings if the forecast is holding but to some extent only managers on the spot will know how the event will effect their school/hospital or wherever.

Heads do make the decision and this is the only way it can work, but to be fair, they do rely on external information and guidance as well as thier own judgement of their individual context.

They are answerable to the DfE so they have to be prepared to justify why they went against 'all schools should stay open if its safe to do so' and have a clear idea of what was not safe. A red warning v a an amber warning is a scale of safe that they can use very easily to assure themselves.

The health and safety policies will largely be based on model policies that have been given legal input by an LA or Trust and then indivualised or they may have model policies come from the LA, or products like The Key, or more specialily firms. The range of stuff heads are responsible for is vast so they rely on external sources a lot.

I presume that the distinction between amber and red warnings is not solely based on peak temperatures. That is, if the overnight temperatures are greater than previously thought then buildings are less able to cool before the next wave of heat. Unless you have scoured ALL of the forecasting information for changes then I would reserve judgement on the decision making process.

I wasn't agreeing with you!!

My point was that info has cascaded really well. As a parent my job is to manage my child's medical condition - not the school. If I believed they needed to stay home that is my personal responsibility.

The warnings change as it ia not just about temperature on individual days. This heat wave is bad because of the humidity and high night time temperatures, the cumulative impacts of days of high humidity and heat can pose a greater danger especially for people unable to keep themselves cool.

Honestly, the news has been nothing but warnings and advice this week. I have also had a number of emails from various transport companies and organisations with information about their service plans. I spoke to the gardeners for our block of flats on Monday who said they were not going to be working after 8am this week and gave us the option of cancelling early visits this week to avoid early noise.

Short of ordering people to stay at home and enforcing it, I am not sure what more various agencies can do right now.

No confusion here - I’m well aware of what the relative role of UKHSA, Met Office and other gov depts would be in issuing health alerts 😊 It’s a shame you can’t say the same. I was trying to explain to you why your confusion around heat health alerts and why some areas have them / some don’t / why they change is not just down to temperature on any given day - as you seemed to suggest in your previous posts.

Sadly, as with PP’s who have pointed out to you why your overly simplistic ‘if x, then y’ approach couldn’t possibly work in practice, I can see my attempt to help you understand has been unsuccessful.

So you don't want us to have air conditioning in schools and hospitals? I remember when I lived in Nigeria, guys in sheds at the side of the road selling bootleg whisky had air conditioning. You'd like for our infrastructure to be worse than that? OK then.

You want the government to pay to retrofit AC in all schools and hospitals, in addition to installing the air purifiers (remember that hot topic after COVID?) on top of upgrading all the insulation and heating systems because they are freezing in winter, not forgetting the repairs needed because ceilings are collapsing due to RAAC concrete?

I’m sure you’d want AC that was a bit better quality than the units Nigerian bootleg whisky sellers have!

I know someone who was doing a six mile charity walk yesterday, so the charity cancelled it obviously. Guess what, several of them did it anyway. So you can give advice, but it doesn’t mean people take it.

Air Conditioning in new hospitals is one thing. The systems can be installed, set up and managed really well to avoid “sick building syndrome”. All new hospital and school buildings have it. Retro-fitting a system into an existing building is a massive undertaking and not all buildings can take it. You can’t just stick aircon unit on the windows of a hospital or a school as it would cause more problems than it solves. It would cost £ billions to do it properly and mean a reduction in bed/desk spaces for a decade or more, in a system that is already over-stretched. Our current climate isn’t warm enough to justify that. Hopefully by the time it becomes necessary, our building estates will be new enough to deal with it.

Until then, we have a system that generally works. Health Agencies issue health warnings and local authorities do with that information as they see fit. You cannot have a whole nation being closed down. The information is based on the best science available but will never be able to make 100% predictions when dealing with weather. I find it incredible as an apparently educated person you can’t understand the changing nature of weather.

Your issue is with the school or the local authority, not with central government. If you have specific needs, you make decisions on a personal level. We saw in Covid how wholesale closing of schools just didn’t work for many people. We saw how a blanket ban on leaving your house, the reduction of the NHS, sports facilities etc had a massive negative impact on disabled people in particular. It was necessary for those times, but not in this situation. You said yourself mocks are expensive to reschedule. If the government had closed all schools and it turned out the weather was cooler, you would complain about that. If they closed your school but you had plenty of aircon and cool spaces, you’d have complained about that.

The best thing English schools could do is shift the school year to match Scotland. Today is the last day of term. We didn’t need to consider closing schools yesterday but if we did, it’s so close to the end of the year it wouldn’t have been a problem. Prelim exams happen in winter, main exams in April/May. The kids return mid August as the weather starts to become cooler.

In November 2020, about fifty people turned up the war memorial to pay their respects on Remembrance Sunday, against government advice. (Attendance is normally 300 or more people.) Make of that what you will.

Different schools have different situations so I don't know how we can avoid localised decisions in response to sorcific circumstances. My grandson's school is an old victorian building, north facing, small windows surrounded by trees. It was like walking into a chilly old church, so very different from children on the third floor in a 60s block with huge windows.

Bjt presumably you arent held accountable for it and someone getting heatstroke or dyeing if you cancel it.

This is why organisations are often more risk averse than individuals.

OP you are showing lack of understanding of the law and function of public bodies.

UKHSA's role is to advise. Employers are legally responsible for the health and safety of their employees and others on their premises. Schools are required to make their own decisions about health and safety at their own school and must have someone knowledgeable about health and safety or have access to someone who does - eg at the local authority or at a corporate level within the trust.

Just because you think it should work differently doesn't make it so.

So thats 5 years. It was also previously public health england and the plan was split into hot and cold. So all the guidance was there. In the past 5 years the information is to plan for all type of weather including red alerts.
The ukhsa cant write each school an individual plan. How big do you think it is???
It also has other things to do besides weather.

Short of ordering people to stay at home and enforcing it, I am not sure what more various agencies can do right now.

For many people, going to work in an air conditioned building, or sit in an air conditioned cafe, would be preferable to staying at home. It all depends on individual circumstances.

Luckily, UKHSA actually has a method for dealing with this, which is a grid in terms of how they determine amber Vs red alerts. So for your area, my expectation is that the likelihood of it getting as hot as it did will have been lower but the severity just as high (see attached image once it has been reviewed).

Also luckily, UKHSA doesn't spend £2Bn per year on heat health alerts, but rather on the many many different jobs they have. As per their own website:

"What we do
Our work protects every member of every community from the impact of infectious diseases, chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear incidents and other health threats.
UKHSA science
Evaluation and translation

• Behavioural Science and Insights Unit (BSIU) (click “behavioural sciences” tab to see the BSIU homepage)

Radiation, chemical and environmental hazards (RCE)

• Radiation protection science
• Chemicals and toxicology sciences

Specialised microbiology and laboratories

• Culture collections
• Diagnostics and Pathogen Characterisation (DPC)
• Food and Environmental Proficiency Testing Unit (FEPTU)
• Food, Water and Environmental Laboratories (FWE)
• High containment microbiology and biological services (HCMBS)(HCBS) CL-3 and CL-4 in vitro and in vivo
• Public health microbiology
• Regional and clinical laboratories
• Vaccine Development and Evaluation Centre (VDEC)

Scientific strategy and development

• Centre for Climate and Health Security
• Medical Entomology and Zoonoses (MEZE)

Virology and pathogenesis, pathogen characterisation

• Biosafety
• Biosafety full scale research (mock hospital) ward
• Diagnostics (DX) accelerator

Clinical and public health

• Blood safety, hepatitis, sexually transmitted infections and HIV (BSHSH)
• Clinical and emerging infections
• Clinical and Public Health Response (CPHR)
• Gastrointestinal Infections and Food Safety One Health (GIFSOH)
• Genomic Public Health Analysis (GPHA)
• Healthcare and Associated Infection and Antimicrobial Resistance (HCAI and AMR)
• Immunisation and vaccine preventable diseases
• Pathogen genomics programme
• Rare and Imported Pathogens Laboratory (RIPL)

Health protection operations

• Emergency Preparedness, Resilience and Response (EPRR)
• Global operations
• National operations
• Regional teams

Data, analytics and surveillance

• All Hazards Intelligence (AHI)
• Analytics and data science
• Data and cybersecurity
• Data operations "

Oh and they also procure and distribute all childhood vaccines as well as all COVID vaccines.