FOCUS ON SCOTLAND FEATURE
Free hospital parking at Edinburgh’s Western General hospital has sparked complaints from staff, patients and those who live near by. And staff at Aberdeen Royal Infi rmary complain outpatients are often more than half an hour late for appointments because they simply cannot get parked. One nurse there gave her parking space to a woman who was an hour late for a chemotherapy session.
Open to abuse
Catchlove says: ‘Free hospital parking may seem like a wonderful idea at fi rst, but it is open to abuse.
‘The big issue is commuter parking. Commuters are coming in, using the free parking, then going to work. There’s no urgency for anyone to get back to their car as they know they’re not going to get penalised. This has a knock-on effect for staff and patients. They fi nd there is nowhere to park. It can also have a knock-on effect in the roads around the hospitals, too, as they’re overcrowded.
www.britishparking.co.uk
‘It would be a hugely political decision for the government to go back and introduce paid parking again to hospitals, but it would be the right one. The BPA’s aim is to get these car parks opened up to paid parking again to try to reduce the congestion and get everything moving again.’
And in recession-hit Britain there are obvious cost implications, too. With no revenue from car parking charges, the money needed to maintain hospital car parks has to be raised from already over-stretched trust budgets instead.
Blue badge concessions
At Ninewells hospital in Dundee, there were protests when paid parking was extended to disabled badge holders. But it makes sense. Vinci, the fi rm that manages the car park at Ninewells, offer 94 disabled spaces including 70 located near the hospital entrance. The spaces operate on a pay-and-display basis with a four-hour limit, but if a patient is delayed for longer than four hours, due to an appointment, then no penalty will be applied.
JULY 2012 31
If England goes the same way as Scotland and introduces free parking in hospitals, it will suffer the same problems as we are suffering
Gordon Catchlove
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