Car park?

I was not timetabled to be at work today, but I had agreed to go to a meeting at 0930, and I wanted to get the rotas done for January.

I set off in reasonably good time, but forgot that the normal route to work was going to be blocked for several days, starting this morning.  On arriving at the hospital, now running late, there were no parking spaces anywhere in the staff car parks, nor in the patient and visitor car parks.  I ended up parked in the bushes.  In getting the car into this space, I regret to say, I damaged a bush.  And you can't easily see I am parked in a mud bath.

By the time I returned to my car at 1730 (I put in a full day in the office on my day off!) there were plenty of spaces.

Staff and visitors alike are often scathing of the hospital for not providing enough parking spaces.  The hospital is PFI funded, and the builders were restricted on the parking they were allowed to provide by the planning permission.  The theory was that it would encourage people to use public transport.  But you can only use public transport if there is a bus or train serving your village early enough to allow you to get to work/your outpatient appointment on time.

There are similar misconceptions about the number of beds - the size of the hospital was dictated by what the funders at the time wanted (I think it was the PCTs at that time, NHS funding has gone through several iterations since then).  It was not OUR choice to build a hospital too small.  Again, the theory was that more and more surgery would be done as day cases, and more care would be provided "in the community" - though not in community hospitals, because these were also being shut down.