sherbert
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Going off topic a bit but still to do with hospitals, I found this from the Daily Telegraph staggering £100 million last year from hospital car parks?
Hospitals 'should continue to charge patients for parking' Hospitals should continue to charge patients and visitors for car parking, despite raking in around £100 million last year, according to the body which represents healthcare trusts.
By Kate Devlin, Medical Correspondent Last Updated: 9:27AM BST 06 Apr 2009
NHS Confederation said that the fees, which can range from £2 a day to £3 an hour, were "often necessary" because running car parks was expensive.
They were also useful to deter non-visitors from clogging spaces, it said.
However, the report, called "Fair for all, not free for all", said that it recognised that having to pay for parking could affect many patients treatment as well as their financial situation, and recommended that some be offered concessions.
The NHS in England is thought to have made around £100 million over the last year charging hospital patients and visitors to park their cars.
At the same time charges have been abolished in all but three hospitals in Scotland and are being phased out in Wales, following announcements from their devolved assemblies. Critics said that the charges were a "tax on the sick" and called for the charges to be scrapped outright.
The report recommend that some staff and patients, for example dialyses patients who need to visit hospital regularly, should benefit from cheaper car parking.
But it insists that hospitals need the revenue to ensure that medical services are not affected.
The report also says that hospitals should also be allowed to spend any extra money they make from car parking charges to improve patient care.
Additionally, some hospitals, particularly those in city centres, need to charge to deter non-visitors using parking spaces to visit nearby shops, the confederation, which represents 95 per cent of NHS organisations, warned.
Mike Hobday, head of policy at Macmillan Cancer Support, said: "You cannot have a 'fair' parking policy when it is morally wrong to force cancer patients in England to pay to park at hospital while they have their treatment.
"This report puts the rights of hospital managers to be independent above the rights of patients to receive their healthcare free.
"The NHS must do much more than pay lip service to this important issue. Many hospitals are still ignoring guidance issued over two years ago which said that people travelling regularly to hospital must get free or reduced parking.
"As a result cancer patients have been left struggling to meet parking charges. England must catch up with the other nations and scrap this tax on illness."
Andrew Lansley, the Shadow Health Secretary, said: "If parking charges are damaging patients' access to services, stopping their friends and relatives from visiting or impeding staff from doing their job properly then they're clearly too high."
Norman Lamb, the Liberal Democrat health spokesman, said that patients forced to visit hospital on a regular basis should have guarantees that they would be charged at a discounted rate.
He added: "The Department of Health already has guidelines in place but they are often flouted."
But Joe Farrington-Douglas, senior policy manager at the NHS Confederation, said that hospitals were in a difficult position.
"Hospitals need to balance the demand for free parking with ensuring access for those patients and visitors who really need to drive, reducing carbon emissions and funding the costs of running car-parks," he said.
"There should have the freedom to set policies locally to ensure they provide fair access but not always free parking.
"There is no doubt that car parking can become a controversial and heated issue, especially when you have very ill people who need to be driven to hospital for regular treatment or night workers who have no option other than the car because of the hours they work.
"For their part hospitals feel the need to charge for parking, both to recoup the cost of running their car parks and to prevent their misuse.
A spokesmen for the Department of Health said: "We do not think it a sensible use of tax payer's money to subsidise free car parking at hospitals for anyone who wants to use it."
The report also recommended that hospitals should consider the environment when considering transport to their facilities.
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