The medical team at the Isle of Wight Festival said they have seen fewer heat-related issues than expected but a 15 per cent rise in incidents since last year.

Medical commander David Rock, from Festimed, expected 40 per cent to 50 per cent of patients to suffer heat stroke and other heat-related issues but said it had been far less and called it a “reasonable” weekend.

“We were expecting it to be a lot busier with the heatwave,” he told the PA news agency.

“We increased the capacity greatly for that. Luckily, we didn’t need to use any of that.

“We’ve had a 15 per cent increase in heat-related incidents since last year… now we were expecting that to be up to 40 per cent or 50 per cent because of the extreme heat,” he said.

“The temperatures did have an impact on us, but it wasn’t to the level that we were geared up for, which was great.”

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The medical tent, which had around 75 professional staff, runs 24 hours a day to treat everything from minor injuries to more severe incidents, such as cardiac arrest.

“We kind of treat (the festival) as a little mini-city that we provide the medical facilities for,” Mr Rock said.

“It’s fully set up ready for anything from a hurty finger all the way up to a cardiac arrest, but luckily we don’t get to too many serious ones, which is good.”

While the team has had to deal with one festival-goer with a cardiac condition, generally there has been “nothing of great significance”, which Mr Rock believes has been partly due to the increase in drinking water taps across the festival site.

“The site here has done a huge amount of work on extra water points, social media, talking to people and telling people to shade, wear sunscreen, drink fluids, and it’s paid off,” he said.

The site has around 150,000 pieces of medical equipment and medicines including antibiotics, which patients can collect without going off site to a hospital or GP clinic, which Mr Rock said “alleviates pressure on the NHS which is already stretched”.

Mr Rock also said there has been a “huge reduction” in the number of alcohol and substance-related incidents at this year’s festival, which has limited the pressure on the medical tent.

“It’d be wrong for me to say that there wasn’t any alcohol or drugs on site – there definitely is – but luckily it’s quite small amounts and hasn’t had a huge impact,” he said.

“Normally, we’d have a fair few people in our recovery area, but this year it’s been a huge, huge reduction on that.”