Are hospital trusts cashing in on the sick?
Patients in England are being penalised with increasing parking charges with 30% of hospital trusts having raised their parking charges over the last year.
The most expensive hospital carpark in England is the Royal Surrey County Hospital in Guildford which costs £4 per hour; this fee has doubled over the last 3 years. At the other end of the scale, car parking at Trafford General Hospital in Greater Manchester is free for up to three hours.
The most expensive trusts in England (for a one-hour visit)
- Royal Surrey County Hospital £4
- Hereford County Hospital: £3.50
- Stockport £3.50
- Bristol Royal Infirmary £3.40
- West Suffolk Hospital £3.30
Laura Keely, campaigns manager at Macmillan Cancer Support, said charges are particularly unfair on cancer patients. “They often need to make frequent trips to hospital. They should not be left out of pocket in order to receive life-saving treatment.”
Some NHS trusts offer concessions to visitors whose loved one is terminally ill and also discounts or weekly tickets for lengthy courses of treatment.
Visiting hospitals is not something anyone would choose to do. Patients are vulnerable and quite often anxious and visitors can be distressed too. Is it right that at a time like this you are charged to park your car, quite often at a premium rate? In addition to this, the charge is usually on an hourly basis, and attending hospital can be unpredictable in terms of time required, so there is an additional stress factor imposed when pre-purchasing a parking ticket.
What are your views? How much is the hourly charge at your local hospital? Is paying to park to visit a hospital morally wrong? Should these parking charges be significantly reduced or abolished?
What are your views?
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park on our own land.
There are reasonable Pay and Display car parks with regular services to the hospitals but they don't always meet the needs of working hours or hospital appointments.
I don't have an answer to the problem but the NHS budget is constantly squeezed and money has to be raised some how. When one considers Type 2 diabetes alone costs the NHS 1 million pounds a day, you get some understanding how expensive health care is. I am not sure what people are expecting as their health care needs are free at the point of delivery and I am sure private parking companies are taking advantage but no one has come up with a better option.
There is a budget used for parking and this has been ignored. It does not need to be paid for from our fear and sadness. It's cruel and unhelpful.
Car parking charges are not even the tip of the iceberg.
The NHS is grossly under-funded when set against the increasing demands placed upon it. The staff at are breaking point. So many are stretched beyond their limits.
Advances in medical technology cost money - last I heard half a million pounds for a scanner!
There's a black hole in the pension fund. Add to that, as I read recently in our press, since the beginning of the financial year £800,000,000, yes eight hundred million pounds, has been paid out in compensation claims - I'm sure a good many were spurious claims.
We need to get some reality about the NHS. Our National Insurance contributions don't cover pensions or our health service.
The NHS needs a massive amount more funding if it is to survive in the form we know it - free at the point of need.
It seems to me there are three choices before us.
1) Leave funding as it is and watch the decline in services - medical staff emigrating, better treatments for us unavailable and facilities closing. I mean here either unnecessary pain and suffering or possibly a preventable early death. It could be your child or grand child. It could be you!
2) Pay for private medical care - some people already do that, but also must pay National insurance. No cost benefit there. But is private care so readily available as the NHS? Not in my experience.
3) Raise taxation across the board, including our pensions. The NHS gets 196 billion pounds a year now and it can't cope with demand. It has been suggested 250 billion pounds a year would meet today's demands. If we all gave an extra twenty pounds amonth directly to the NHS what a difference that would make!
My family has not always been served well by the NHS, but none the less, so many millions more have. Thus, I'm not so partisan as it may seem.
But I plead with you tonight, kidnap your M.P.'s, besiege parliament, do whatever, but get NHS funding increased to realistic levels.
If not, we'll all suffer, your family and mine.
I concede your parking charges may seem like robbery. Perhaps that is the case. I don't know.
But my case is, somehow, the NHS needs, actually absolutely must, be funded properly. Parking charges are but a plaster over a gaping wound which won't heal until money, very serious amounts of it, are applied.
If you and I are writing on SS we're fifty years old or over. I'm sixty five. This is the time we begin to need long term drug therapy, physio etc., and it costs money. Someone must pay!
A point I haven't made yet about the NHS. Our parents delivered a Health Service to our generation which worked. It took care of us youngsters. Question, unrelated to parking charges - what are we delivering to our children and grand children?
I put it to you, it is nothing compared to that we received.
Maybe it's time to think again about the personal value of the NHS to us and our so valued descendants. What are we leaving them?
Thankyou
Helen
Over the 3 days he was an inpatient they must have had in excess of £50 from myself and other family members. Pluswe often had to queue to park as there were never enough spaces.