Half of Facility Bedrooms Lack Independent Cooling
Since the beginning of summer, Barcelona has faced exceptionally severe weather, recording 52 “tropical nights” with temperatures exceeding 25°C. Against this backdrop, a sample survey of 125 nursing homes conducted by the newspaper El Periódico de Catalunya has exposed critical infrastructure shortcomings. The data shows that only 67 facilities (approximately 53.6%) have equipped individual residents’ bedrooms with air conditioning systems. The remaining 58 facilities only provide cooling in common areas such as dining halls and multi-purpose rooms, leaving a large number of elderly residents to suffer from high temperatures during their sleep.
Outdated Regulations Create a Supervisory Blind Spot
Although the lack of cooling in bedrooms has raised public concern for the health of vulnerable groups, it is not a violation under the current local legal framework. According to Catalonia’s 2015 regulations on facilities for the elderly, nursing homes are only required to maintain an overall ambient temperature below 27°C, with no specific temperature limit or mandatory air conditioning for private bedrooms.
More critically, some older nursing homes registered before 2015 are still adhering to outdated 1987 standards. These earlier regulations hardly took into account the increasingly frequent extreme summer heatwaves of today. This means that as long as the temperature in a facility’s common areas meets the standard, any potential heat risk in the bedrooms falls into a de facto regulatory blind spot.
Nighttime Heat Exacerbates Health and Management Crises
In daily operations, managing heat during the day is relatively straightforward. Most nursing homes mitigate high daytime temperatures by gathering residents in air-conditioned common areas, ensuring they stay hydrated, or organizing water-based cooling activities. However, as night falls, residents must return to their non-air-conditioned bedrooms to sleep.
The Catalan Association of Care Resources (ACRA) has acknowledged that continuous high nighttime temperatures have become the most challenging problem facing the industry. Although the association is trying to alleviate the situation by adding fans or physically cooling hallways, retrofitting all older facilities with air conditioning in individual rooms is unfeasible in the short term due to aging building structures and high renovation costs.
Residents in Care Facilities Face Higher Mortality Risk
The deadly threat of extreme weather to vulnerable populations is becoming apparent. A recent academic study published by Universitat Pompeu Fabra indicates that following extreme heatwaves, the mortality rate among elderly residents in nursing homes increases significantly more than for their peers aging at home.
The research team explained that besides inadequate cooling hardware and poor ventilation, key factors contributing to the heightened health risk include a sharp increase in summer care workloads, staff shortages, and caregivers themselves being affected by the heat. Furthermore, elderly individuals who choose to live in facilities in modern society often have more complex chronic underlying conditions, making them extremely intolerant to sustained high temperatures. Despite strong calls from the academic community to increase staffing and urgently revise heat protection standards for nursing homes, the Catalan Department of Social Rights has stated that there is currently no specific timeline for initiating such regulatory changes.
