Hospital parking charge rises to £3

12.25.29am GMT Sat 23rd Dec 2006

It's going to cost an extra £1 a time to park at Southport and Ormskirk hospitals from 8th January 2007. Southport and Ormskirk Hospital NHS Trust is upping the car parking charge from £2 to £3 in an effort to reduce the deficit. The Trust has to make further savings of £6.5M on top of £8.5M already budgeted for. According to the Southport Visiter the increased parking charges will bring in an extra £300,000 a year.

The Trust has been placed in an impossible position by the Government's crazy internal market accounting rules. The situation has been made even worse by Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt insisting that the NHS has to break even by next April.

Putting up parking charges is less bad than further redundancies or reductions in patient care, but yet again it is patients and relatives that are going to suffer. The situation is particularly bad for us in Southport due to the split nature of hospital provision, with some services including children's A & E and maternity having moved to Ormskirk.