Tunis – Public sector health unions in Tunisia have called for a comprehensive health emergency to be declared in the country, holding the Ministry of Health fully responsible for managing the severe heat wave crisis coinciding with frequent and unprecedented power and water outages, which have caused enormous and unprecedented pressure on the health system.
A severe crisis in public hospitals and an overcrowding of victims
In a joint statement, public health sector unions said, “The Ministry of Health has chosen a suspicious silence at a time when the state’s responsibility and the leadership’s duty demand an urgent national mobilization to confront a health crisis that worsens daily.” They added that the country is experiencing a serious crisis due to the heatwave coinciding with power and water outages, and that public hospitals are overwhelmed by an emergency situation amidst a chronic shortage of funding and resources. They explained that the capacity of emergency and intensive care units has reached a critical level, while forensic departments are receiving unprecedented numbers of victims, and the Ministry is leaving hospitals alone on the front lines while power cuts threaten the lives of patients on ventilators.
The repercussions of the energy crisis and the rise in deaths
During the summer of 2026, amidst a severe heatwave, Tunisia experienced frequent power and water outages affecting various regions and vital facilities, including hospitals, maternity and neonatal centers, and pharmacies, raising concerns about the potential impact on drug safety. In this context, Wajih Dhakar, head of the Tunisian Organization of Young Doctors, indicated that the number of deaths due to heatstroke had ranged between 150 and 200 in the preceding days.
Urgent union demands for national emergency measures
In closing their statement, the health unions expressed the readiness of the sector’s professionals to exert all efforts to save the Tunisian people and prevent the collapse of hospitals, demanding that the supervisory authority approve health emergency measures at the national level, activate crisis cells centrally and locally, provide exceptional resources, prepare a national protocol for prevention, inventory and maintain electrical generators, and publish accurate statistics on the victims of the heat wave.
