A record-breaking October heatwave sent 1,084 people to emergency rooms in Adana and Şanlıurfa over four days, including 286 patients who were admitted, according to figures released on Thursday by regional health officials. Nineteen required intensive care. Doctors say the surge was made worse by a public health response that treated the end of summer as the end of heat risk.
A weather station outside Adana recorded 42.6°C (108.7°F) on 20 October, the highest October reading in its 54-year record. Night temperatures stayed above 27°C (81°F) in parts of the region, leaving homes and hospital wards little chance to cool. Officials said the emergency visits included dehydration, heat exhaustion and worsening heart and kidney conditions.
The plan ended with summer
The region’s heat-health protocol was due to expire on 30 September. It called for extra ambulance crews, public cooling rooms and checks on people with chronic conditions, but none of those measures was automatically reinstated when forecasts turned severe in October. Dr Ayla Aydan, a former physician who helped shape the protocol before entering parliament, called the calendar rule “a bureaucratic fiction with a human cost”.
At Adana South Hospital, emergency physician Cherechi T. Oluwakemi said patients arrived in waves, with some waiting in a corridor where two cooling units were out of service. “We were treating heat illness in a room that could not get cool,” she said. The hospital’s own tally showed 73 heat-related admissions in 48 hours, more than twice its usual load for that period.
A plan that expires on a date does not make the heat stop on that date.
Dr Ayla Aydan, physician and member of parliament
The government’s regional health directorate said its hospitals continued standard emergency operations and that no patient was turned away. A spokesperson said the directorate had sent additional supplies to facilities and would review whether seasonal protocols should be extended. The figures released so far do not break down how many visits could have been prevented by earlier outreach or cooler waiting areas.
Clinics built for a shorter summer
Ebiere Joshua, an epidemiologist at the Anatolian Centre for Climate Medicine, said the pattern was not simply a case of unusually high temperatures. Public health plans still focus on summer months, she said, while dangerous heat can now arrive outside that window. “The system is organised around a calendar, not the body’s exposure,” she said. “That is an avoidable failure, not a surprise.”
The cost of fixing the gap is modest beside the pressure on hospitals. A regional proposal to upgrade cooling in 14 clinics and keep mobile teams on call through October was priced at ₺86 million (about €1.7 million), but officials approved less than a quarter of that sum last year. The directorate said it had not yet completed a fresh review of the proposal.
The immediate test will come in the next forecast cycle. Health officials say they are preparing a temporary extension of heat alerts and will assess whether clinics need extra cooling equipment before next summer. Joshua warned that waiting for a second record-breaking spell would repeat the same mistake: “People do not become less vulnerable because the calendar says autumn.”
