That should be interesting. Our local "INTERSERVE" (aka money into private pockets) private company might be a trifle miffed. They control parking charges, catering, security, maintenance, laundry, portering, patient meals, costa coffe, god knows what else. Someone is in someones pockets. Lets see our Jeremy sort that out. 1600 tonnes of waste etc etc. Another vote from Dave.
As a letter the Times points out today, there is also the question of staff using their cars to fill up the patients' parking, and in some cases, commuters doing the same.
At Addenbrookes in Cambridge, they had a bloke who controlled the barrier to the outpatients' car park. He only opened it if you showed him your appointment letter. Then you only paid a quid for however long it took.
Have they bought the freehold on the satellite carparks then?
A more serious one is that most of the surrounding satellite carparks for hospitals have been sold off to private contractors in a one off fire sale so that you cannot use a weekly hospital visitor parking pass in them and have to queue to get into the small central carpark on the main site. This mode of failure regularly gridlocks the A576 past Salford Royal Hospital in Greater Manchester. They have had to cancel the bus lanes to prevent the road becoming completely impassable!
Wow! That is very good value. It's £1/hour minimum where I am.
Quite. Many supermarkets have to control parking in some way, so I'd guess a hospital no different, for the same reasons. Perhaps those who insist on free parking want the medical etc budget reduced to pay for this?
Never quite understood why it's fine to pay for some bits of the NHS - like specs, dentistry, prescriptions and so on, but hospital parking should be free?
Nor have I. Everything that is covered by the NHS should be "free at the point of use". I think that's the phrase from the original NHS "mission statement" (though they didn't call it that in those days!).
I think if they are going to charge for parking it should be strictly at cost, without any profit element or any inflated price to encourage use of buses instead of cars. And there should be an initial 30 minutes (or whatever figure is decided is reasonable) to allow drivers to drop off or collect patients free of charge.
I'm a lot happier now that local hospitals have 'pay on exit'. It was always stressful when an appointment was delayed and you worried about whether you'd purchased enought time. I pay less than I used to because of this.
You get the first 20 minutes free round here (Kent and Canterbury). And also and Maidstone/Tun Wells ( I was in last week for surgery and have had multiple visits). That has the dual effect of (a) allowing drop of and pick-up free and (b) letting you get out of the car park again if there are no spaces.
And both trusts have arrangements for low cost long stay in emergencies.
Amusing story last week (I was on the short stay ward for about 2 days). One guy had come in for day surgery, and his wife had dropped him off. She isn't keen on driving, so left the car in tha car park for a few hours and took the bus home. She came back in the evening and found he was going to be in overnight after all, and asked him for the car keys. He said she'd insisted he gave them to her, but she denied that and showed she hadn't got them. Had to get daughter to collect her. Next day she came back - with the keys. She'd left them in her 'other' jacket. They took pity of them and gave them a parking dispensation.
One of the more sensible charging systems was at Pontiac in Michigan. You paid a fee for parking for one day, so if you dropped off an outpatient, then went into town to do shopping, came back later to visit, went away, and came back again that evening to collect the patient, you only paid once.
So what do you think the "cost" is? The only sensible measure is the opportunity cost, in other words the local market price.
Free hospital parking is a daft idea, at least in urban areas. Look at the controls you would need to block commuters, shoppers, and other abusers. By all means have exemptions for special cases (daily visits to acute patients, etc), easily enough arranged by a special card.
I probably spend a couple of hundred pounds a year on hospital parking at the moment, and regard it as an acceptable tax.
Because if you are a genuine patient you might not be fit enough to use other forms of transport - and cheap parking is more cost effective than sending a minibus-ambulance to pick you up from home.
But they pay a flat fee to operate the car parks, and the NHS doesn't have to pay for its own parking assistants. The NHS Trusts have by and large decided that this is an equitable arrangement, even if it inevitably means the patients pay more.
Sainsbury's have built a huge car park next to one of my local hospitals. It actually works pretty well. I get to park free as long as I shop in Sainsbury's afterwards.
I would prefer that the medical budget were reduced to improve accessibility. The problem with the NHS is that it lacks customer choice.
The original mission statement assumed that NHS costs would steadily come *down* as people became healthier. Typical rose-tinted thinking by politicians.
Impossible to enforce. Have you noticed the type of vehicles parked in supermarket mother-and-baby or disabled places ?.
Either you have an uncontrolled free-for-all or you have charging without exception. Remember Aberystwyth ?
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Red lines were introduced because people were just 'popping' into shops.
I have a choice of three big hospitals and two smaller. Slightly spoilt by not all of them offering every procedure. And apart from the small one a mile away, the rest are all about an hour, and end to suffer accessibility issues on account of being on out-of-town sites.
When it started out everything was 'free'. But that encouraged people to go to a different dentist for another pair of dentures. Or specs from an optician, etc. It's said. Or to get a medicine they didn't really need - since it was free.
Should the same apply to medicines? No profit element? GPs also work at cost price?
Trouble is give something 'free' and people will find a way of abusing it. 'I was only 10 minutes over the 30 and got fined' or whatever.
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