12:00PM, Friday 15 September 2017
Disabled badge holders may soon have to pay for parking at Wexham Park Hospital following a review by the Frimley Health Trust.
In a statement given to the Express, the trust said it has been reviewing car park
arrangements at its three sites: Frimley in Surrey, Heatherwood in Ascot and Wexham.
A spokesman said: “The review has included introducing discounted rates for weekly and monthly tickets and considering whether to continue with automatic free parking for all blue badge holders – currently about half of hospitals in England do this and half don’t.
“Patients who are currently entitled to free parking through low income or benefits will still be able to claim parking fees back.
“We have been consulting with a number of patient groups, such as local Healthwatch, our disabled patient user groups, and of course our own governors. We are planning to formally feed back to these groups by the end of this month so we won’t be able to announce the full details of the new arrangements until we have done this.”
However, locality manager for Healthwatch Slough Nicola Strudley said the consultations on hospital parking and transportation have not been widely published and some service users may not be fully aware of them.
She said: “We raised the point around public transport and community transport.
“We’ve done some trials from the buses in town and it’s quite a nightmare.”
She also said she was not sure whether many families of patients were aware they could purchase parking tickets for visits over one, two or three months at Wexham Park.
“You only find out about them by chance, they’re not advertised,” she added.
It is not just patients who have to pay for parking at hospitals belonging to Frimley Health NHS Foundation Trust.
Last month, a Freedom of Information request by the Express revealed hospital staff have spent more than £2.5m on parking at the three hospitals in the past two years.
A total of £1,207,866 was made from staff parking at Wexham Park and Heatherwood staff for the financial years 2015/16 and 2016/17.
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