Staff, patients and relatives all suffer stress as result of NHS parking difficulties

The recent call for an investigation into NHS parking (“2,000 NHS staff still waiting for hospital parking”, The Scotsman, 17 February) is long overdue, but it is essential that the scope of an enquiry is wide.

My credentials for this letter are that I am a retired consultant anaesthetist. I worked as a senior trainee in New York City and consultant equivalent in the Harvard Hospital group in Boston. I have also visited hospitals in the US, Canada, France, Germany, Switzerland, Austria and Russia when giving invited lectures and workshops. It is important to look outside the UK and to be aware that in no other country of which I am aware are clinical staff denied reasonable parking at work.

Clinical staff do not work “office hours”, but long and often anti-social hours. Denial of parking has many serious consequences. It increases the duration and stress of travel to work so that staff do not arrive in the best condition to provide the highest quality of care. The cost of child care is increased when travel times are prolonged. Increased risk of travel is perceived when long journeys are made in darkness.

Difficulties with parking almost certainly contribute to difficulties in attracting and retaining staff. One certain example of which I am aware is that in Glasgow many nurses who were expected to transfer from the Western Infirmary or Gartnavel General Hospital to the new Queen Elizabeth University Hospital decided to take work elsewhere, the most frequent reason being that they would be denied parking and their journeys to and from work would take longer and be more difficult.

I am positive that patients have died as a consequence of denial of parking to senior clinicians. In my working life there were many occasions on which I made post-operative visits, which were not contractually required, to patients and these contributed to improved outcomes. I saw other clinicians have the same beneficial effect on the outcome of patient care. As a consequence of modern NHS failure to provide sufficient parking, it is virtually impossible for senior clinicians to provide this enhanced care. In addition, patients and relatives suffer stress as a consequence of difficulties with parking. I believe that the only solution, as in other countries, is provision of sufficient multistorey parking.

An open, wide-ranging enquiry is needed to improve care of patients and relatives, working conditions of staff, and, even more important, safety for patients. JOHN HENDERSON

Croftside, Aviemore