Chaos on the streets predicted
Nurses from the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (Nicu) are calling on the Wellington City Council to stop its plan to limit parking around Wellington Hospital, saying they will lose trained staff as a result.
Jackie Chin-Poy, nursing specialist at Nicu, said she was concerned for the safety of younger nurses on late shifts, having to walk to their cars in the dark.
“We’re very pro-green and really want this to work, but actually, we’ve got a tertiary hospital that needs nurses, and we need patients to be able to have access to that hospital.”
Restricting parking on the streets around the hospital to just three hours – part of a council plan to manage the high demand and give residents priority – could be the last straw for the hospital’s staff.
When nurses couldn’t find a parking space, they sometimes had to use patient parking spaces to make their shifts, and this created a “ripple effect” where more patients were late to appointments, and valuable time with specialists was wasted, Chin-Poy said.
Nikki, another Nicu nurse, said it took five years to train new nurses to use a ventilator. But with low pay and stressful working conditions, colleagues were leaving for Australia once they were trained. “If you don’t address the parking, that’s what’s going to happen,” said Nikki, who did not give her last name.
Ward administrator Jane said the council was laying its urban planning problem back on individuals.
“In our case, it’s working women who have complex jobs and families ... Public transport is not an option. For most of us, we go to work in the dark and we go home in the dark.” She said she drove an electric vehicle from the northern suburbs to make sure she was at work on time at 7am.
Helen Grove, who has a 5am start at the hospital, said her alternative to an 11-minute drive was a 50-minute walk down a dark road without footpaths.
The proposed P180 limit for non-residents was unthinkable for healthcare workers who needed to rest during their breaks, not move their cars “and try to scramble back to your job in 15 minutes”.
For a hearing focused on parking, the council’s Regulatory Processes Committee heard a lot of submissions about a crisis in healthcare.
Neurologist Duncan Smyth said the plan felt like a kick in the guts. It would make life “extremely difficult” for more than 1000 healthcare workers who parked on the streets around the hospital each day. He predicted a very chaotic situation on the streets of Newtown if the parking limits went ahead.
“I think there is a real risk that you’ll see people leaving as a result of this, which will put further strain on the hospital. Hospital staff have really been forgotten about in this process,” he said.
Tony Paine, Mary Potter Hospice chief executive, said the charity was seriously concerned about losing healthcare staff as a result of the parking limits.
It already took nurses about 20 minutes of driving around the block to find a park, he said. He was worried that if parking became limited in the way the council proposed, staff would not be able to park.
“We’d be short-staffed in an environment where we’re already short-staffed because the health system is falling apart.”
There were also serious concerns about the effect on patients and their families, he said. “We have family with their loved ones, as they are spending their last days on Earth in the hospice.
“If we ring you up and say, ‘You need to come to the hospice, the time is near, you need to be here’ ... The last thing they want to think about is car parking.”
Not all health workers were against the plan.
Marion Leighton, a doctor, was most concerned at the fact that the plan for residents’ parking would discourage people like her from car sharing and using cars only when they needed to, rather than year-round. Other than that, she was in support of the scheme.
“I’ve been discussing the hospital and its parking issues for 25 years. They will not sort out their issues until they are forced to do so.”
Stephen Maslin, a nurse who lives in Newtown, said “people lose their minds over parking” but the council needed to try a different approach. “Please be bold. It may not be popular, but we cannot keep giving away a free commodity.”
He asked the council to do the changes in one hit, rather than rolling them out gradually, starting with Newtown West before moving to Newtown East, even if this meant a delay to the scheme. Otherwise, the council risked creating real problems with parking chaos in the east, where the scheme would not apply.
The parking scheme is expected to come back to the committee for a final vote on 4 April.
Local Paekawakawa-Southern ward councillor Nureddin Abdurahman said he was concerned that the timeline did not leave much time to make tweaks based on the feedback.
“If we ring you up and say, ‘You need to come to the hospice, you need to be here’ ... The last thing they want to think about is car parking.”
Tony Paine, Mary Potter Hospice CEO