Wrong for nurses to pay £7 to park at their own hospital
Jan 23 2009 Letters
Dear Editor, I feel compelled to write to you to highlight what I believe to be the appalling state of affairs in the hospitals in England with regard to car parking.
My mother was taken into Good Hope Hospital in the West Midlands on December 27th and despite the very best efforts of the medical staff, sadly passed away on the afternoon of January 16th.
She received the highest standard of care from dedicated doctors and nurses in the Intensive Therapy Unit (ITU) and her final 24 hours were handled with the utmost care and I have nothing but admiration for the staff involved. My father, brother and I were able to remain with her throughout this period and take some comfort from our last day with her.
However, during this extremely distressing period one of us was obliged to occasionally leave my dying mother’s side to go and feed the car parking meter, under the watchful eye of the ever-present parking wardens (employed by an outside contractor). The comparison between the professionalism and compassion of the medical staff and the frankly money-grabbing attitude with regard to car parking is almost beyond belief (a side issue is that at it was almost impossible to obtain change after 8pm at night).
Furthermore, having spent the best part of three weeks in and out of the ITU department we got to know several of the nurses quite well, and I was frankly disgusted when informed that they also have to pay £7 per day to park (one nurse told me that she had been fined £30 for over staying in the car park when she volunteered to work longer to help another patient).
As the option of public transport is not always practicable due to the various locations where the staff live and the 12-hour shift patterns that they work they are effectively being taxed hundreds of pounds a year.
Finally, with the abolition of hospital parking charges in Scotland, following the example already set by Wales, this disgraceful state of affairs only exists in England. The argument that charging for car parking is a financial necessity is also nonsense as according to an article in The Independent on December 31st, this measure raised a total of only £116 million from hospitals in England.
Given that the total budget for the NHS is c. £110billion, car parking is raising a mere 0.1 per cent of that. It is also undoubtedly the case that the outside contractors that actually run the car parks are earning a handsome profit, thus reducing the actual income to the NHS.
Set against the carefree way that the government is now spending hundreds of billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money in an attempt to prop up the financial system, hospital car parking charges are exposed as nothing more than a mean-spirited mendacious method of fleecing vulnerable people and dedicated medical professionals. It is also undoubtedly the case that the outside contractors that actually run the car parks are earning a handsome profit, thus reducing the income to the NHS.
This situation must stop immediately.
Gary Carter, The Mount, Shrewsbury
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Planners should hold their heads in shame
Dear Editor, Your article “Putting travellers on the right track”, 20 January, illustrated the value of a £280 million monorail from the airport to the city centre in just 16 minutes. Sadly this is all 20 years to late and the Birmingham City planners should all hang their respective heads in shame for their gross lack of efficient transportation planning over the past few decades.
Liverpool has a metro, Paris an underground metro reaching anywhere in the city, as does Madrid, even a station terminal inside their Barajas airport. London’s metro covers the whole inner and outer city areas. Birmingham, the second UK city, has a monorail from the International station to the airport, a matter of a few hundred metres, that appears to be the best they could achieve over the past 20 years of major traffic congestion.
Try to get out of the city at the Broad Street/Five Ways island at peak times. The Belgrave Pershore Road and Bristol Road islands, taking 20 minutes to get past one set of traffic lights. Kings Heath high street, a fiasco of 20 years of planners’ total abrogation for future smooth traffic movement – a total car park from 8 to 10am and from 3 to 6pm. If ever a metro or bypass was needed it was there.
If Neil Maybury, the Birmingham Business Focus director, is focusing just on the A45 Coventry Road, what about the rest of the snarled up city traffic? Birchfield/Walsall Road, the A435 Maypole/Evesham Road and the Hagley Road fiasco. The only Birmingham saving grace is the Queensway Tunnel, without that the whole city centre would be a car park. The now proposed 20 year plan, sadly, should have been in the 1970s, when it appears that all our city planners went into a traffic solving hibernation.
Mr Maybury claims that our inadequate Metro hasn’t made any money over the past 20 years, how absurd, is public transport about “making money”, or about a clean and efficient service into the city centre for commuters, removing cars from our bumper to bumper roads? Services from the Maypole, Great Barr, Castle Bromwich, Halesowen, Yardley, not just from one selective area that “makes money”. Birmingham now has some of the worst traffic congestion that I have ever experienced in 40 years of driving. Just Dublin has a worse traffic flow problem, a city with equally inept planners on their pay roll.
Mike Kelly, Kings Heath, B14
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Councillors aren’t there for just local issues
Dear Editor, Mr Khan is simply wrong (Letters, January 20) when he claims that Coun Salma Yaqoob is playing communalist politics over the Gaza crisis.
I attended the rally in Victoria Square which she co-chaired.
She consistently stated to the majority Muslim audience that this issue was not about religion, it was about politics. And she was emphatic on this point as she introduced the Jewish speaker Sophie Stern.
Mr Khan is of the view that city councillors should restrict themselves to expressing opinions on local issues only.
I disagree.
Councillors have a responsibility to express all the concerns of their constituents.
As a constituent of Coun Yaqoob, in a ward where thousands of pounds has already been raised in relief efforts for Gaza, I think it is right that she should seek to channel those concerns into the democratic process.
Ger Francis, Willows Road, Balsall Heath.
