Featured Image: Local Democracy Reporting Service Image of QMC BBC article about energy efficient windows Oct 22
The Medilink Service is part of Nottingham’s community transport network, CT4N established as Nottingham Voluntary Transport in 1979, Nottingham Community Transport in 1988 becoming CT4N in 2016. Medilink is part of that community service with Nottingham City Council.
Is it time to build and integrate it further? When you go the QMC and City have a look at their campuses, their parking and think about how we undervalue everyone in the NHS: brilliant minds, skills, research and learning that could be brought to bear on the actual problems that impact on health.
Can QMC take control of currently incredibly profitable parking to develop health around transport to and from the two publicly owned hospitals in Nottingham? At the moment everything is voluntary in the same way that the previous government looked at social media apps and platforms before the Online Safety Act.
Patients, health professionals and visitors don’t realise just how profitable hospital parking is not to our NHS but to the private companies.
Journalists don’t realise that it’s not the hospitals that are profiting but that these private companies have swingeing powers inside the estate of hospitals to allocate parking passes and control the culture around access to the car park. I learnt this while working on car parking on the two hospital sites during Covid from staff who issued passes for the companies and staff, patients and visitors to the campus. They felt as if somehow some fundamental right had been taken from them. Their right to park freely, safely and without anxiety might be stalled for months and months before they finally received their pass. Unison have looked into inertia fining of visitors and staff to hospitals but they haven’t looked into how the whole culture is affecting health and wellbeing.
Car parking companies don’t just make profits but they make enough profit to return a few million back every couple of years to the hospitals as if they’re charitable donors. Because everyone inside the hospital accepts the culture dictated by the car parking (and security companies) they don’t feel that have the ability to change, shape or evolve the place they work in. The conservative government had begun to make allowances for free parking for people on low incomes but their guidance had no deeper insight into the impact of these companies on the health of the culture in hospitals.
To understand what is missing consider how many parking companies have greened the environments they extract so much money from? Where are the beautiful 2024 carparks in the UK? Certainly not around our hospitals that are should be making illness better. Why should going to hospital as a worker, patient, visitor be such a stressful experience? Why should accessing care be such a by product of overcoming so many other obstacles in the health setting?
Doing more to make hospitals healthy, modern, less institutionalising places will make everyone healthier.
Yet in the health service, in the community we have the capacity, we have the ability, we have the knowledge, skills, tools to transform the warehousing of talent, the warehousing of health, the warehousing of the future.
We are super qualified to make Britain well again.
We can do so much more, do so much better. We do want, need to be in relationship with each other as we go into hospital, go to work in a hospital: we don’t need to be treated as if this is the best that can be done while big companies are sucking the life out of our vocation and our illnesses, like the car parks, alienating hospital visitors, patients and staff.
There are at least 175 different professions with all their embedded worldwide inheritances inside the NHS: those professions should be respected, we should be growing a human NHS out of this potential: world class insight into the way we can do local.
Learning and sharing knowledge should be prioritised so that you feel when you go into a hospital that the medics have it, this hospital is run by medical professionals not by giant security companies, car-parking companies, cook chill food and care home baronies supported by highly processed food brands and charities.
We need to think again about valuing learning, knowledge and skills and rejuvenate our hospitals. It’s 2024, we live in a modern economy: we just need to let that energy flow.
Having worked on a staff and patient Medilink Travel Survey at QMC during Covid I know that in supporting and developing this service that they’re always trying to improve the quality, reach and fairness of the service they offer to all NHS staff, patients and visitors.
Everyone with any contact at all with QMC in particular, is aware of traffic, parking, pollution and how contact with these don’t in any way contribute to health and recovery.
If we could change the culture in hospitals to move big corporates out of them and give the funding to replan the hospital campuses to in-house and local, regional, nationally valued businesses and people wouldn’t we all benefit?
If you haven’t used Medilink below is some information.
Medilink is part of a Transport Nottingham culture encouraging smart use of cycling, walking, tram, cars, taxis,reduces anxiety stress, risk and around traffic, parking and car pollution. Their idea is that hospitals shouldn’t be toxic places and anything they can do to reduce cars on the road and make journeys seamless for patients, visitors and staff they’ll do. The drivers are brilliant.
CT4N Medilink 1 + 2 are bus services connecting Queen’s Medical Centre and Nottingham City Hospital: Medilink 1 starting at the QMC forecourt (first bus at 5.00am, the route going then to the NHS Treatment Centre, then back to QMC forecourt, on to Wilkinson Street and on to the City Hospital South entrance). The first journey of the day takes around thirty minutes. The bus runs every twelve minutes until 6pm then every twenty, to twenty five minutes until the last bus at 20.36 Below: Medilink 1
Medilink 2 Starts at Queens Drive Park and Ride first bus 5.00 am going to the QMC forecourt. They run every twenty minutes until 6.30 then every twelve minutes throughout the day until 7pm, every twenty minutes until eight o’clock, then every half an hour until the last bus at 9.30
Above: Medilink 2
Roadworks started in July 2024 to repair damage to the bridge over Middleton Boulevard which was badly damaged in 2018 when a lorry carrying an excavator crashed. You can access National Highway incidents, current and future roadworks on Highways England site
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