Another bit of welcome news - Nicola Sturgeon announced today that there would be a review of car parking charges at hospitals. I was a witness at the Health Committee meeting that was held about this last June in Holyrood and I was distinctly unimpressed by the reasons given for having a charge in the hospital car parks. Basically, the argument went that there was all these fly parkers going in so the charge had to be imposed. The fact that the fly parker would pay for his ticket and then leave it there for the rest of the day, didn't seem to bother Consort. All suggestions about having a barrier, car park tokens, showing your appointment card and all the things that are used at public buildings as a matter of course to prevent this problem, cut no ice with the car park owners. Staff that were travelling to the hospital, were having to pay; in effect having £500 docked from their wages before they even crossed the threshold of the door. There was a suspicion that these charges esp at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh, were being used to pay for the interest on the PFI loan that built the hospital.
However, this problem is rather more complicated than it would first appear. One of the features of modern hospitals is that they tend to be built out of town. This is because some years ago, capital charging was introduced on NHS properties, to encourage the NHS to get rid of buildings that it wasn't using. So if you had a hospital in town ie Glasgow Royal Infirmary, then the capital charge on that would be prohibitive. If however, you had a hospital out in the middle of nowhere like Hairmyres, then the capital charge would be much lower. So the NHS started building out of town.However the downside is that many of these hospitals do not have good transport links and the only practical way to get to them, is by car.
One of the worrying features of this, as I mentioned in a previous post, is what would happen if you needed all your staff if there was a major incident. By definition, none of them would live near the hospital, and all of them would have to travel a considerable distance to get to the hospital. If the incident occured on say, the M8 and you had to travel along it to get to the hospital, what then?
If the hospitals want their staff to leave their cars behind, they are going to have to rethink their transport links, and on a wider scale, the government is going to have to rethink the whole centralisation issue. Bigger isn't always better. However, there is one thing that could be done fairly easily to encourage people to travel by public transport; re-man railway stations at night, and bring back bus conductors. It would make everyone feel a lot safer, and cut out most of the boorish behaviour and vandalism that we have come to accept as normal on trains and buses. You don't believe me? Well, when I was going to school in the eighties, I travelled on the trains when the stations were manned; there was very little bother on them. When they de-manned the stations, within weeks, gangs of neds appeared on the trains and by the end of the year every station from Coatbridge to Glasgow had been burnt down. Its time for a review of this, and time for a review of transport in general.
