Sunderland Royal Hospital
If, like me, you have been unfortunate enough to have had to visit Sunderland Royal Hospital, unless you went by taxi or were dropped off, you will have been driven to distraction trying to find a parking spot.
That goes for both inside the hospital grounds and in nearby streets, which are jam-packed with cars of patients, staff and visitors – much to the understandable annoyance of residents who can't get parked at
their own front door.
They haven't been able to for years. Now the council reckons it has come up with a solution – proposing a residents-only parking scheme, with one free permit per home and 20 annually for an extra permit and a further 40 for a third badge.
This isn't solving the problem, merely moving it on. And whose problem is it anyway?
Our council has had this woeful fiasco foisted upon it by the Hospital Trust, which for too long has failed to tackle the problem that is on its site and for which it is not only responsible but responsible in creating.
The problem was exacerbated by centralising all the hospitals on one site without any satisfactory parking provision.
Newcastle RVI has a multi-storey car park. And there's nothing to stop us from having one either. The space is there, but not the readies.
The argument that the 9million this would cost could be spent on more healthcare creates a further impasse. This is quite unacceptable, just like this astronomical figure, which could be cut by at least half if the Hospital Trust chose a cheaper model.
But it would seem that we are now in a Catch 22 position because a Sunderland planning committee is not in a position to give retrospective permission for a multi-storey and the consensus of opinion among members is that the Trust won't be making any application for a multi-storey now, in the foreseeable future or probably ever.
So we are stuck with the problem. The new parking proposals for residents, as shown in the two exhibitions this week, do not resolve this problem in its entirety by any means.
And if every resident wanted three permits there wouldn't be enough parking spaces in their street.
And if we all parked at Sainsbury's to catch the shuttle bus to the hospital, there wouldn't be enough car parking spaces there either.
As the problem is moved on yet again with saturation point reached for parking at the Royal, it's a scandal for all who have to go there.
It's high time the health bosses acknowledged this and stopped turning a blind eye to the physical and mental distress caused by this problem.
One reader recently wrote to the Echo letters page after a driver nabbed the space she was standing in for her husband to park, by driving towards her.
No wonder appointments for this hospital come with a warning – "Please leave plenty of time to park."
They ought to come with a health warning: "All who enter here do so at their peril."
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Friday 10 February 2012
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