Hospital Parking

I am indebted to one of my regular readers for this LINK to an article in the Daily Telegraph and HERE to the BBC article.

I've been complaining and so has he that you have to pay and display. All very well if you know for sure that your appointment will be on time. In my limited experience of appointments, only the 6 BCG treatments were on time as they HAD to be delivered within a certain time. Now I'm not knocking the staff but the system. If I have an appointment at 2 pm and I put in an hours worth of parking that would seem appropriate. At 2:50 I'm darting around wondering if I am going to get called or not and then having to go and feed the meter. It means that if I am on my own I have to go and tell someone - if not, the other person who I have brought with me to make sure I am asking the right questions or not forgetting any, has to run out and feed the car park ticket. You know what happens next, as soon as you get up, your name is called and you can imagine the scenario of wondering if you'll get out in time or whether the £30 fixed penalty will be slapped on your motor for they have people going around all the time looking.

This is of course if you can get a car parking space at all as like many Hospitals there is less than enough space, the local supermarket has taken the majority of it and on all 6 occasions that I had BCG treatment my wife had to circulate and double park in the car park until I came out.

And as a final whinge this morning - the last part of the article about charging for bedside phones and TV is absolutely true, they want you to buy a card - minimum charge of course applies that you can't give to the bloke next door when you leave and you can only get free radio. worse than that the screen is full of adverts and "wakes up" and starts playing the adverts. Mine just gets pushed face first to the wall. They try and turn it back out but I push it firmly where it belongs. There is some spotty little kid comes around and checks the TVs and also puts them in front of yor face. You don't want to hear what I said to him.

Why Hospitals need to resort to this sort of cheap commercialism is obvious and I'm sure some minor Government official will be telling me it is for my own good. I can walk to the hospital but that may well have contributed to my high blood pressure episode last week considering that exercise raises your blood pressure.