Parking decision risks frontline care.

Written by Jenny Randerson and published in Western Mail on Thu 13th Mar 2008

The recent announcement that all car parking charges in Welsh Hospitals would be abandoned has received a mixed reaction. Personally, I am extremely disappointed with the decision.

As a developing Welsh political class, we are still in the process of maturing and developing our skills and experience collectively. The UK political class throughout the 19th and early 20th Century went through a similar process whereby the collective good of the country moved up the political agenda and beyond party politics.

My belief, and the belief of many patients and clinicians, is that the NHS is too valuable and too stretched for decisions to be made on any other basis than clinical need. Car parking charges, when hitting patients with serious illnesses or recurring treatment and their families are plainly wrong. However, providing free parking for anyone and everyone, even if they are commuters in nearby office buildings, is at best misguided.

What is also of concern is the way the announcements and policies have been planned, handled and announced. The Health Minister has told all Trusts to remove their charges by the 1st April and to come up with a plan to deal with the lost revenue by the first of May. Surely some mistake, you may think. Surely, it would be sensible to give the Trusts a chance to develop a plan to deal with the shortfall in revenue before the charges are scrapped.

Both the BMA and MacMillan have campaigned vigorously for free parking, arguing that car parking charges are a "tax on the sick." To understand the problems with this powerful argument, we need to look at why some hospitals have free parking and others charge. It is clear that those hospitals which charge are those which have had a problem with providing adequate car parking for staff and patients. If you take away those charges, demand will rise considerably. There will be no incentive to use the bus or train instead. Hospital Trusts, no longer gaining an income from their car parks, will obviously stop managing them to prevent illicit parking from nearby businesses and shops. As a result there are likely to be no spaces left for the elderly and the most sick.

So the very people this policy is really designed to help - regular out-patient attendees and those who are frequently visiting inpatients - may well be left with nowhere to park at all.

In the letters page of the Western Mail this week, the Welsh Lib Dems were accused of penalising cancer patients through our policy. Not only was this extremely hurtful, but it was untrue. Cancer patients are exactly the sort of people we think should have free parking at hospitals, we just think the money it will cost to give free parking to everyone would be better spent on frontline services.

As long as there are people being forced to wait for life-saving treatment, as long as there are people being forced to go abroad for kidney transplants, then we should not be spending NHS money allowing commuters to park in hospital car parks. I took a very similar view with universal free prescriptions; as long as the NHS cannot afford to supply life saving drugs, we should not be paying for millionaires to have free bandages and skin-moisturiser.

Ben Bradshaw, the English Minister for Health, clearly thinks along similar lines because he criticised the Welsh Assembly Government decision for diverting funds from frontline care and undermining their green strategy.

In this tight financial climate, it is a question of priorities. We need to allow our health professionals, our doctors and nurses to prioritise their spending on the most pressing medical needs. While there has obviously got to be political responsibility for the overall funding and strategic direction of the NHS, I think that this is further evidence of the urgent need for localised, clinically based decision making. The one size fits all approach of the Assembly Government is storing up massive problems for the Welsh Health Service.