Top medical journal argues hospital parking fees should be abolished

The Canadian Medical Association is mounting an attack on hospital parking fees.

An editorial in the Canadian Medical Association Journal calls parking charges on hospital lots potentially illegal.

"Parking fees amount to a user fee in disguise and flout the health policy objective of the Canada Health Act," the editorial argues. "In Scotland, parking at NHS hospitals has been free ever since fees were abolished in 2008.

"Parking fees are a barrier to health care and add avoidable stress to patients who have enough to deal with. They can and sometimes do interfere with a clinical consultation, reducing the quality of the interaction and therefore of care. Almost every hospital doctor in Canada would be able to narrate anecdotes of patients being preoccupied with parking fees."

Hospital administrators quickly sprang to the defence of parking fees.

Geoff Roberts, parking director for the Fraser and Vancouver Coastal health authorities, told CBC News parking fees cover non-medical hospital costs. If they were eliminated it would take money out of the health care budget.

"There are still costs to administer the parking, whether you charge or not," he said. "We'd still need to identify vehicles. We'd still need to provide patrol and enforcement. We'd still need to provide signage, lighting, paving, snow removal, landscaping. All those other expensive items don't go away whether we charge or not."

But the journal's interim editor-in-chief, Dr. Rajendra Kale, who wrote the editorial, doesn't buy that argument. The revenue is miniscule compared with a hospital's overall budget.

"For example, for the Ottawa Hospital, for the fiscal year 2011/2012, the net parking revenue is projected at $10.8 million while the total revenue is about $1.16 billion, excluding revenue from parking. That is a small sum to pay to get rid of parking-centred health care."

Kale, an Ottawa neurosurgeon, has some support.

David Montgomery, president of Haldimand War Memorial Hospital in rural southwestern Ontario, said his facility's favourable financial position has allowed it to do without parking fees.

"My own personal philosophy is that we shouldn't have to charge patients and visitors," he told the Toronto Star. "We should be doing whatever we can to make it easier for them to seek out care."

In Delta, a suburb of Vancouver, parking meters are banned throughout the municipality, including its hospital.

"I think having loved ones around you to assist you is a part of patient care, and it's part of having the family and friends attend," Mayor Lois Jackson told CBC News.