Hospitals: the burning question

There was a time – back in the early 1990s – when I used to make frequent visits to Arrowe Park Hospital in the Wirral. 

That’s the peninsula opposite Liverpool.

Arrowe Park Hospital
Scene of many a visit of mine back in the early 1990s

The company I worked for back then had supplied the hospital with a remarkable system to support healthcare staff. To this day, it remains the most powerful Hospital Information Support System or HISS, as we called them then, that I’ve ever come across. Healthcare staff could quickly, reliably and accurately, enter requests for tests or treatments, record test results or the delivery of treatment, or simply consult a patient’s record. It was a great system, and I would take pride showing groups around the hospital to see it in use. Many of the groups came from abroad.

Often, the then Chief Executive, Frank Burns, would meet the group and give a brief, and usually witty, talk. In one remark has always stuck with me, he told a group:

“The problem that keeps me awake at night isn’t a patient falling off an operating table. It isn’t a patient receiving the wrong blood in a transfusion. It’s car parking.”

It’s not hard to see why. There’s only so much car parking space. So who gets priority? Staff without whom no patient would be treated? Patients without whom there’d be no point having the staff? Visitors to patients without whom they’d recover so much more slowly?

And, at a time when hospital budgets are under terrible pressure, do you charge or do you not? And if you do, how much do you charge?

That last point reminds me of another hospital that I’ve visited quite a few times, the Royal Free in Hampstead, north London. I’ve mostly been there for work, but also for personal reasons: it’s where my grandmother died, for instance.

On one work visit, I was shocked by the charge being made for the car park. I couldn’t resist mentioning it to one of the people I saw in the hospital. I didn’t mention it until after we’d dealt with the business, of course; it seemed imprudent to raise the matter until I’d got to know him well enough to be sure he wouldn’t take it badly. Which, as it happens, he didn’t.

“Ah,” he said, “the costs are exactly the same as on Hampstead High Street.”

The High Street is only a few minutes’ walk away.

“The used to be much cheaper,” he went on, “but people kept parking here and then heading up to the High Street to do their shopping. We had to introduce the charge to stop them doing that.”

It’s not that simple a question, you see, hospital car parking charges. There needs to be some way to make sure that limited parking spaces aren’t being abused for purposes other than visiting the hospital or going in to work.

Obviously, a system could be put in place to allow people to pay less, or nothing at all, if they’re patients or visitors to patients. But that costs money and takes staff time. And neither of those are in abundant supply in the British NHS today.

All that becomes particularly relevant today because hospital parking charges are the latest scandal to hit the news. And it seems dead easy: there should be no charge in England as is already the case in Wales and in most of Scotland.

But, as the Royal Free proves, that’s not that simple. After all, we really don’t want to offer Hampstead shoppers an inexpensive parking opportunity so they can do their shopping more cheaply. After all, with some of the most expensive properties in London, Hampstead isn’t a district for the poor or underprivileged.

The Royal Free Hospital
Too close to Hampstead High Street to provide free parking

No wonder Frank Burns was kept awake by hospital car parking. Rather than any of the other issues you’d expect to be troubling a busy Chief Executive.