Hospital Pain

It’s neither attractive nor picturesque, and this machine with a number of others like it has been the pain of my life in the last year.
 
The problem — its insatiable appetite for money. Mine, and the thousands of patients and their relatives unfortunate enough to have to visit hospitals.  It’s not even worried what sort of money — coins, notes, and if you’ve got neither, a card will do!
 
It’s bad enough if you are visiting a patient in hospital because parking charges are rated by the hour, and you cannot very well cut short your visit on account that your allotted time in the car park is about to extend into another hour.
 
If you’re an outpatient visitor the problem is compounded through no fault of your own. Take today, my wife had a 3pm appointment. We sat in a waiting area almost an hour before she was called. The actual consultation with a doctor took no more than five minutes.  But guess what?
 
It was long enough to roll over to a second hour for our car in the car park. So instead of a £2 charge the cost to park had rolled over to £3.50.  To make matters worse nothing had been achieved in the five-minute consultation.
 
Curiously it seems to happen each time we visit that consultations run late, and inevitably we find our parking charge moving into the next bracket. And beyond.
 
It’s a controversial issue wherever you park, but it always seems more galling at a hospital, when as a visitor to a hospital you may well be worried out of your mind by the very reason that you or a loved one are at the hospital, to then be met by punitive charges to visit.
 
Perhaps even more exasperating is the knowledge that this machine, and those like it, are collecting handsome sums.
 
 According to our local paper, the Daily Echo, Southampton University Hospitals raked in an astonishing £3.5 million last year from parking charges at the city’s General Hospital and the nearby Princess Anne maternity hospital.
 

Unfortunately we have both needed to visit the hospital on many occasions over the past year, so we are acutely aware that we alone have made a not insignificant contribution to that fund.