00:00In June we saw well over 400,000 people in our A&E department, so you know we have busy
00:07days
00:08and less busy days, but over the course of the month it was over 400,000. That was 16,000
00:15more
00:16than we saw in April. That's four and a half times filling Wembley Stadium with people who come to
00:23A&E departments. London Ambulance have put 600 more ambulances on the road to cope with the demand.
00:31One of the real privileges of my job is I have responsibility for the whole capital and
00:37one of the things I do is go and visit hospitals. So I visited a couple of hospitals last week
00:45and
00:47the first thing to say is staff are working under really really difficult conditions when it's this
00:52hot. Quite a lot of hospital buildings are quite elderly and they don't always have modern air
01:00conditioning and if we think it's bad for staff, imagine being a patient who's not very well in
01:07in those environments and we do our best to make it as comfortable as possible. But the department I
01:16went to on Friday morning was really busy. I was there 10 o'clock in the morning, 10 o'clock
01:22in the
01:23morning is usually quite a quiet time in A&E departments and already they had a period of time
01:29where they had 12 ambulances arrive in an hour and there were queues of patients waiting to be seen and
01:39quite a lot of that were the consequences of the very hot spell we're experiencing at the moment. So I
01:45think if the weather carries on being this hot there will be an increase in deaths and then mainly
01:54we're going to get away from heart attacks, strokes and respiratory illness.
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