Coping with extreme heat in primary maternity care: An ethnography of frontline health workers in rural Zimbabwe

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Highlights: •Health workers deliver maternity care in conditions of extreme, escalating heat. •First empirical qualitative study in Africa to examine how staff navigate extreme heat in maternity wards. •First qualitative ethnography globally to apply Adaptive Thermal Comfort Theory to clinical labour. •Heat adaptation emerges as a collective, resource-dependent, institutional and material process. •Protecting frontline staff from extreme heat is essential for climate-resilient health systems.