The main car park at SWAH RMG80
IT HAS been claimed that staff and patients at the South West Acute Hospital are still struggling daily to find car parking spaces.
And several believe that the Western Trust should be making more effort to increase the number of spaces at the complex. The Trust, however, claim they have been making efforts to ensure that parking isn’t a problem for hospital users.
Hospital porter and former union rep Benny Cassidy believes that the present situation is bad for morale and says the Trust needs to accept that there are just not enough spaces at present.
Mr Cassidy suggests that the Trust make use of ‘green’ areas on the site to develop more car parking.
“They have to look at a better way of doing this. They are paying out for landscaping and keeping green areas which I believe is costing an absolute fortune to maintain. You would think they could turn some of that into car parking area and non-fee parking.
“There is a any amount of green space that they could be considering at the front and back of the building,” he added.
There are managed and unmanaged areas within the hospital complex. The multi-storey car park is managed by a barrier, but others are patrolled manually.
“But the last thing we want to see is the carpark areas being a cash generator. It should be a facility for the staff and public and that is the bottom line,” he stressed.
“It can be so difficult to park and any staff I have spoken to tells me that they just keep driving around until they find one,” he said.
“But that is eating into valuable care time. And it is also very frustrating on staff. If you are trying to get into your work and your manager is expecting you in at a certain time, but it is not your fault because you can’t get parked,” he added.
Unison representative Jill Weir said, “I know the Trust has relaxed some of the areas and allowing parking and they also recognise there are not enough spaces. I hear that there are hopefully measures being put in place to free up more spaces and to repaint some of the white lines to minimise wasted spaces . Again I will state that we do not agree with carpark charges and state that there would not be a problem if there were enough parking places to start with.”
A spokesman for the Western Health and Social Care Trust said, “Since implementation of the new car parking operational procedures, the Trust has already seen a significant and positive impact in the appropriate use of disabled bays with drop off/pick points and blue light routes remaining clear.
“With support from the traffic management staff the Trust has been continually monitoring the 832 free and 146 paid car parking spaces and traffic flow activity across the entire SWAH site and have taken feedback from both staff and visitors.
“In monitoring the demand and parking position we have made adjustments in real time on site as appropriate to help meet demand. To date this includes flexing the ratio of paid/unpaid spaces in the SWAH two tier car park and redesignating areas of the site at busy periods to allow parking notices to be waived. This is starting to provide us with the necessary flexibility and additional capacity to help alleviate the situation particularly at peak periods,” he added.
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