HOSPITAL PARKING
Making parking the least of hospital visitors’ worries
David Peach, managing director of parking enforcement and permit specialist, Workforce Dynamic, takes a look at some of the fundamentals for developing and maintaining a ‘workable’ hospital parking strategy that caters effectively for a disparate group of users.
Hospital parking is certainly one of the more emotive facets of a typical hospital’s operations; it brings together a disparate group of users, many of whom may be visiting a site under considerable stress. During the pandemic, parking has been one of many areas of service provision that have been brought sharply into focus. The need for increased numbers of staff to travel safely to their workplaces meant parking provision needed to rapidly adapt. However, the underlying fact remains that parking on healthcare sites is a scarce resource.
Clinical and medical support staff are, of course, critical to the delivery of frontline services, and their timely arrival at the hospital or other healthcare facility is key to them providing prompt and efficient patient care. Day patients, meanwhile, need to be able to park swiftly, or they may risk missing their appointment and disrupting clinical scheduling. Add to this mix the vast range of emotions that hospital patients and visitors go through – which must surely be unique among car park settings – and might typically include fear of medical treatment and outcomes, anxiety of over loved ones, lack of familiarity with the surroundings, and varying degrees of infirmity and disability – and you have a heady cocktail. Car parking needs to be the least of patients’, staff’s, and visitors’ worries, and as far as possible, spaces need to be available, and car parks easy to use, and lacking surprises.
To charge or not to charge? Of course then to consider is the whole debate around whether parking should be free. Few would deny that parking provision comes at a cost – there is no such thing as free parking. Aside from the maintenance of the facility, parking in a hospital environment carries a high incidental cost – missed appointments, staff punctuality, development needs, service dissatisfaction, and environmental impact, to name a few.
When there is a straight choice between charging for parking – to at least covers its costs – or taking those costs
Camera-based parking occupancy solutions can show available spaces and capture vehicle registrations.
out of a clinical/operational budget, universal free parking seems a difficult case to argue. As always though, it is a question of degree, and the Government directive in December 2019 for NHS Trusts across England to offer free parking to key groups reflects the fact that needs are disparate, and that some users are more adversely affected by charging. It is a fact though that, free or paid, pricing will always be a key component of demand management.
Demand management, operations, cohesion
There are, I would suggest, three main strands that need to come together to create a workable parking strategy. These are demand management, operations, and cohesion – making the rather useful acronym, ‘DOC’.
Demand management is mostly about capacity – the ability for the parking infrastructure to cope with anticipated demands. This will include road networks within and beyond the hospital site, the
actual capacity of car parks, and the ability of systems such as barriers, payment solutions, and the like, to cope with both vehicle and pedestrian volumes. While historically, managing demand and capacity have been seen as a largely reactive process, technology in the form of hardware and software can now play an important part in managing and influencing usage patterns and patterns of behaviour.
Most healthcare facilities will run a staff permit scheme in some form. They can be a useful tool for managing access for authorised users, but, as with any system, they are only as good as the data that resides within them, so ongoing and consistent data management is a key requirement.
Criteria management
As a general rule, a ‘catch all’ approach to permit schemes is ineffective. For reasons that include ‘green travel’ initiatives, shift patterns, accessibility needs, and professional need and capacity, a permit
July 2021 Health Estate Journal 57
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