Hospital parking fees sting like bees

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 26/04/2021 (1939 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It’s Friday morning and someone is about to jab my arm with a needle that looks roughly the size of a whaling harpoon.

For the record, I am not talking about getting a shot to help protect me against COVID-19 or one of its more infectious variants.

No, I got THAT shot Thursday morning and, as I described in a column in Saturday’s newspaper, that one was a piece of cake.

The process at the RCB Convention Centre, home to Manitoba’s biggest vaccination clinic, went off like clockwork and I didn’t feel a thing when a retired nurse injected me with the Pfizer vaccine.

On Friday, instead of someone injecting something into my body, a health-care professional had to take something out of my body. To be specific, I’m talking about blood.

Every few months, I have to visit the lab at St. Boniface Hospital and undergo blood tests so that my diabetes doctor can tell how well I’m doing against another potentially lethal disease that qualifies as a global pandemic.

As always, having the needle stuck in my arm to withdraw a blood sample was a walk in the park. But that’s not today’s medical point. No, today’s medical point is that I want to complain about one of the biggest issues facing our health-care system — how (bad word) difficult it is to find a parking spot near a hospital.

If you think I’m kidding around in a light-hearted manner, then clearly you are the sort of annoyingly healthy person who does not routinely have to find a parking spot within three time zones of the nearest hospital.

What I am talking about here is FREE parking. In most Canadian cities, it is harder to find free on-street parking near a hospital than it is to find (hold on while I think about an appropriate analogy) someone who thinks former U.S. president Donald Trump did a lot to help Canada-U.S. relations.

A few years back, when I was hosting a fundraising dinner for Riverview Health Centre, I got to hear a speech by Dr. Brian Goldman, an emergency physician who is mainly known as the host of CBC’s award-winning radio series White Coat, Black Art.

What Dr. Goldman said that night — and it surprised quite a few of us — was that the issue that he probably hears the most complaints about from listeners is (dramatic pause) hospital parking. Fees discourage some patients from seeking care and discourage people from visiting sick relatives or friends.

If you have a few spare seconds and Google the words “hospital parking,” you will get roughly 730,000,000 results, including more than a few news reports about patients, nurses and everyone else upset about how hard it is to find hospital parking and how much it can cost.

In an editorial in 2011, the Canadian Medical Association Journal said hospitals should simply stop charging patients for parking. Written by acting editor Dr. Rajendra Kale, a neurologist at the Ottawa Hospital, the editorial warned parking charges are a health-care user fee in disguise, and an impediment to good care.

I am currently not a doctor or a licensed health-care professional, but I couldn’t agree more.

There I was Friday morning, driving around and around every street near St. Boniface Hospital looking for on-street parking. Yes, there were a few spaces between some of the parked cars, but they were all roughly the same size as a pack of gum or a deck of cards.

Normally, if I drive around long enough, I will come across someone who is pulling out of a spot. But the problem is, every other person with a medical appointment and a car is doing the same thing and, apparently, they are all more skilled drivers than I am.

Out of journalistic fairness, I should report that, yes, there are parkades right next to the hospital, and, yes, thanks to being a big-shot newspaper columnist, I can afford to pay for parking. But, again, that is not the point.

No the point is that I do NOT want to pay for parking and I would probably complain less vehemently if the hospital was trying to separate me from my vital internal organs than a few bucks for a spot to leave my car.

You know what it felt like Friday morning? It felt like I was driving around a parking lot at a local shopping mall during the Christmas shopping rush and looking for one of those mythical parking spots within walking distance of the mall’s front doors, spots that (and I’m sorry to say this) don’t exist in this or any other universe.

So, like I said, there I was, driving up one street, then down another, spinning my head like that possessed teenager in the horror movie The Exorcist, searching in vain for a free spot into which I could squeeze my car.

In the end, after a good 30 minutes of searching, I had to admit defeat and pull into a for-profit lot directly across the street from the hospital. Then I sprinted inside and waited another 30 minutes or so for a lab technician to stick me with a needle and take some of my blood, which I gave up for free, by the way.

What with being a brave little soldier, the jab in the arm didn’t hurt a bit. But feeling a hand creep into my wallet still stings.

doug.speirs@freepress.mb.ca