| Today a Tayside Health chief confirmed the private company had the right to charge individuals for parking from the day the Carseview centre opened back in the spring of 2001.They had not done so.
Daniel McLaren, head of service at Tayside Primary Care, the organisation responsible for the clinical operation at Carseview, said Jarvis now wanted to take up its “legal right” to introduce parking charges.
Jarvis is the private company that built the £10 million psychiatric unit and operates the non-medical aspects of the building.
No time scale has yet been agreed when charges will be introduced affecting patients, visitors and staff alike who face a charge not yet set but under discussion at between £1 and £1.50.
Mr McLaren insisted there would be no claw-back of unclaimed parking charges for the almost three years since Carseview opened.
Jarvis had “lost income” for that period.
Parking charges have been a bone of contention since they were introduced on the main Ninewells campus a number of years ago. They became a flashpoint amongst the psychiatric service in particular when patients and staff transferred out from Royal Dundee Liff Hospital where the rural location provided plentiful and free parking to the more congested Carseview site adjacent to Ninewells, where parking was already a problem.
Mr McLaren said management and staff representatives were trying to agree a policy that would be fair to everyone, wherever they worked. However, he insisted there was no attempt to introduce parking charges more widely in hospital sites and other health facilities where parking was not a problem.
“If we can avoid car parking across the trust (Tayside Primary Care) we will do so,” said Mr McLaren.
“If there is no reason to have parking charges, we are not going to have them. If there is no parking problem, it is stupid to impose charges on people.”
He agreed that staff were aggrieved when high earners like himself, who had a base at Ashludie Hospital, Monifieth, another semi-rural location where no charging applied, escaped paying for parking at their place of work while relatively low paid nursing staff at Ninewells paid every time they drove to work.
Some staff are reimbursed for parking charges, in particular those required to visit a number of health sites through the course of their working day, but there are “anomalies” in the current system. |
