To support stakeholders with their hot weather communications this year, the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) has updated their communications toolkit for 2025.
This toolkit communicates health information during hot spells to ensure timely delivery of the right messages to the right people. People who are more at risk of becoming unwell in hot weather include:
- Older people aged 65 years and over.
- People who live alone and may be unable to care for themselves.
- People with underlying health conditions particularly heart problems, breathing problems, dementia, diabetes, kidney disease, Parkinson’s disease, or mobility problems.
- People on certain medications.
- People with serious mental health problems.
- People who are already ill and dehydrated (for example from diarrhea and vomiting), and more.
The material in the toolkit is largely the same as last year, with an additional section containing information on other hazards which can occur during the summer months including thunderstorm asthma, flash flooding and drought.
The toolkit supports UKHSA’s Adverse Weather and Health Plan (AWHP) and Weather-Health Alerting (WHA) system, which issues Heat-Health Alerts (HHA).
The core alerting season for HHAs starts on Sunday 1 June, ending on 30 September.
Individuals and organisations that wish to receive the impact based HHA must register to receive the alerts where users will be able to specify which regions they wish to receive alerts for. The alert status is also publicly available on the UKHSA Data Dashboard
