Free parking when visiting sick relatives; but only if you live in Wales
The Welsh Assembly have just announced that hospital parking in Wales is to be free. Where I work, and in just about every other hospital in England and Scotland, you have to pay money to the hospital if you want to visit a loved one, or even if you need to attend the hospital as a patient.
It’s all part of the ‘revenue stream’ - hidden ways in which the NHS is not actually free at the point of delivery. I even have to pay to park my car as a member of staff. This was brought home personally recently, when I had to visit an ill member of my family in hospital. Four pounds minimum charge to park you car in a car park that is notorious for having cars broken into.
Then once on the ward, I experienced another part of the ‘revenue stream’, the scandalous charges that are levied to enable patients to make phone calls and watch TV. My family member had to join a premium rate line and pay a charge to register with them even to receive in-coming calls only.
This is all ties up with the idea that mobile phones in hospitals are somehow dangerous, an assumption that has now been pretty much blown out of the water, as reported on The Register recently. It is theoretically possible to get a mobile phone to interfere with sensitive electronic medical equipment like automated syringe pumps and various cardiac devices, but you have to try pretty hard to get it to happen! But at the moment it seems to be in no-one’s interest (except the patient’s of course) to relax the ban on the use of mobiles by patients and relatives. The companies charging for phone services are making a mint out of the ban, and the hospitals themselves get a nice share of the profits too.
The bottom line is that you can’t (at least not in this cynical medic’s opinion) run the NHS as a ‘business’. If you really want to, I know exactly how to make it run at a profit. Stop all those ill people hanging around hospitals. They’re a real drain on resources.
Exactly right, I wish they would stop this pre-occupation with running public services as a business. It reminds me of Post Offices - they are viewed as just a business, which means of course there’s a rationale to close loads of them down in the name of efficiency. But it completely misses the point that they are more than a business - they are the lifeblood of small communities and should be seen as a service worth protecting.
Great post, by the way.
Couldn’t agree more. And what about prescription charges…?