HOSPITAL PARKING
Parking is, of course, the first part of a many patients’ and visitors’ journey when attending a hospital. People expect the hospital par cark to be efficient, and to offer enough space for everyone who needs to use it. Equally, a good car park should be easy to navigate. At what is often a stressful time for people, the last thing they need or want is a confusing system, a lack of spaces, an inability to pay, and consequently the concern that they may receive a Parking Charge Notice (PCN).
Clarity and communication Because we recognise the importance of clarity, communication, and customer service when it comes to installing a new system in an NHS Trust car park, ParkingEye offers a fully-tailored communication plan in the lead-up to going live with a new ANPR system. This helps to raise awareness of the upcoming changes to a car park to as many users as possible before the system is actually switched on. We will also offer to write to local MPs, give staff briefings, and send out letters, to ensure that drivers are aware of the new requirements. Second to this, the bespoke appeals criteria that we operate with each individual Trust are not widely offered by other parking companies. Trusts set out the conditions upon which a parking charge should be cancelled with their account managers, and this is then referred to when dealing with all appeals at the site. The Trust can also contact its account managers to discuss cancellation of a PCN if it feels that there are extenuating circumstances which should exempt someone from having to pay a charge. This puts the ultimate responsibility for hospital users in the Trust’s own hands. Our ANPR systems are becoming the norm now for NHS Trusts around the country, and are helping to secure new revenue and cut unnecessary spend, while at the same time improving patient experience at hospitals.
Future technology
ANPR systems are also a valuable tool for car park managers when it comes to managing, monitoring, and reporting. Our data analytics tool can provide detailed information about site usage, as well as in-depth trend analysis, which allows intelligent and informed decisions to be made about the future operation of the site. Data analytics will be at the heart of intelligent parking solutions for the NHS going forward, and this new in-depth insight service is something ParkingEye is now able to offer customers. Because our ANPR cameras capture so much information – including when drivers enter a car park and how long they stay – hospital Trusts can mine that data to help make many day-to-day decisions. Whether it’s to dictate visitor hours,
54 Health Estate Journal April 2017 Online booking
We have recently partnered with online booking solution provider, bookaPark. Already up and running at many hotels, including the London Hilton on Park Lane, the integration of bookaPark’s system and
ANPR camera technology plays a major part in ensuring that today’s busy car parks function smoothly.
ParkingEye’s technology enables customers to pre-book and pay for parking spaces online, creating a much improved customer experience that reduces the need for manual administration or for payments to be made on site. Another benefit of the bookaPark solution is that it provides up-to-date information about car park capacity, enabling clients to determine how and when to offer promotions and incentives to customers, helping them to fill empty spaces and increase revenue. This has obvious benefits which could be applied to the NHS, in particular for long-term patients who have a regular appointment and want to be able to pay online in advance for their space.
Good management of hospital car parking requires a combination of measures, including, in many cases, efficient cameras to monitor flow, spot flouting of regulations, and enhance security.
schedule appointments, inform shift patterns, or even coffee shop opening hours, we can drill down into that data. This will become ever more important as Trusts seek to rationalise their unwieldy estates, helping to ensure their parking always meets capacity and yet doesn’t waste space and resources. We are the biggest ANPR provider in the country, with more than 3,500 sites across the UK. The potential for customers to leverage data analytics is almost limitless. In addition to our new data and insight offer, ParkingEye is always working to develop and introduce smarter parking solutions.
Beyond insight and analytics, smarter parking solutions are always being developed to better meet the needs of our clients across all sectors. Future plans include introducing new payment machines which offer improved usability, and more payment method choices for users. Another initiative in the pipeline is a new frictionless parking payment system which, following a one-time registration, allows the correct parking payment to be automatically debited from a user’s account after each visit, removing the need for manual payment altogether. While every healthcare parking contract is different, let us look at a couple of different examples of Trusts we serve.
City Hospitals Sunderland
Until May 2011, parking at City Hospitals Sunderland NHS Foundation Trust’s Sunderland Royal Hospital was defined by a ‘park anywhere’ culture. The single parking attendant could not hope to manage the 3,000+ vehicles using the facility each day, and the Trust faced a large capital cost to replace outdated Pay & Display car park machines. The resulting parking abuse led to congestion, late appointments, and dangerously parked cars and other vehicles blocking access, putting health and safety at risk. The Trust needed a cost-effective solution which would reduce congestion, and ensure that car parks were being used effectively and were available to hospital users. ParkingEye was able to suggest an alternative which involved no capital expenditure or ongoing maintenance for the Trust. The ANPR system now installed captures details of all vehicles entering and leaving the facility without any need for manual staffing. Records are reconciled with machine and phone payments – and permit holder lists – to create an accurate picture of car park usage which helps the Trust plan for the future.
Clear signage is an important element – especially on often very sizeable acute hospital sites.
Through out working in partnership with the Trust the facility has become a free-flowing environment with: n Increased space availability. n Reduced on-site congestion.
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