In Aix-les-Bains this summer, postal worker Harmony Simon climbed the stairs to Martine Combe’s apartment carrying no letters. Combe, sixty-eight, had covered her windows with scraps of aluminium foil as the room climbed to thirty-six degrees.
The visit was part of a national policy introduced in June by Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu. It extends the work of French postal workers beyond registered vulnerable residents and turns their daily routes into a way to identify isolated elderly people who fall outside municipal welfare registers.
Martine Combe in Aix-les-Bains
Simon found Combe living with diabetes and asthma, and suggested reflective survival blankets used by marathon runners. Simon said the trick had lowered the temperature in her own flat by several degrees. That sort of doorstep advice is now part of the wider change: the postal worker’s job is no longer only delivery, but also a check on people who may not appear on local lists.
Combe’s flat showed why the policy is reaching beyond paperwork. The intervention that mattered there was not medical but a visit, and the visit happened because a postal worker went upstairs as part of a routine round rather than through a formal welfare referral.
June policy introduction
Before the June policy introduction, French postal workers already checked in on registered vulnerable residents. The new policy widened that remit into a systematic effort to find isolated elderly people outside municipal welfare registers, using La Poste’s delivery network, which reaches nearly every household in France daily.
That makes the scheme operationally different from a one-off alert. It builds the check into ordinary delivery work, so the first sign of trouble may come from a doorstep conversation rather than a report filed through a municipal system.
2026 heat episodes
The timing mattered because 2026 has become the deadliest year for heat-related mortality since records began. The UK Health Security Agency put the toll at roughly 2,877 excess deaths across the May and June heat episodes, nearly double last summer’s total and on course to pass the previous record set in 2022.
Yvette Cooper described the effect of sustained summer heat on the NHS in terms usually reserved for winter pressures and thanked care staff stretched thin trying to protect people through the heat. In Britain, the response described here relies on alerts and hospital pressure after damage has already built; France’s postal-worker checks try to find isolated people earlier, before they disappear from local welfare registers.
For residents like Combe, the practical result is simple: the next knock at the door may come from a postal worker, and that worker may arrive with advice as well as a letter route. How many isolated elderly people the June policy has identified so far is not stated.
