Christchurch Hospital workers are sleeping in their cars before work to try to secure a car park, mayor Phil Mauger says.
Christchurch City councillors have voted to consider making overnight car parks available at Parakiore Recreation and Sport Centre when it opens in October — and to potentially provide free transport to and from the building and the hospital a few hundred metres away.
Hospital workers had been pleading for better parking because of unaffordable fees at nearby car park buildings and due to staff safety concerns.
Mauger told a council meeting on Wednesday that it was clear the problem had not gone away when he visited the hospital recently.
“Some people, nurses and people who work at the hospital, still come to work at 4am in the morning and sleep in their car until it’s time to get up. Just so they can get the car close to their place of their work,” he said.
Other staff had been parking further away but feared for their safety, he said.
“A young lady I was talking to… she said ‘I’ve got a scooter because I know it will go faster than the person chasing me’. Now we don’t need that,” he said.
Mauger said he understood existing hospital parking was not enough to account for the overlap between shifts and he wanted an urgent solution.
“I want to have this going as soon as we’ve got the keys and we [open Parakiore]. I don’t want it to get lost into the system, and it comes out at the middle of next year. We owe it to these people to look after them as best we can,” he said.
In May, a hospital staffer was assaulted on her way to work in the evening and a student midwife was attacked on the way to their car after leaving work at the hospital’s birthing unit at night.
The motion to investigate overnight Parakiore parking received unanimous support around the council table.
Councillor Yani Johanson said it was “incredibly frustrating” that the situation had not been resolved by years of effort to make enough parking available.
“When we started to do some of the roading changes around Oxford Terrace there was a suggestion that we actually as part of a hospital development do a land swap and actually get a purpose-built car parking building to support the hospital at the time, but people didn’t want to go there,” he said.
“Then it was raised, when we were considering the plans for Metro Sports [Parakiore Recreation and Sports Centre] to put a multi-storey car park there and partnership with the hospital.
The health board at the time, central government, for whatever reason rolled out so we didn’t do that,” he said.
Staff were also unable to use a private parking building that opened near the hospital in 2023 because it was too expensive, he said.
“I’m really supportive of us doing more. I feel that people’s safety is really important,” Johanson said.
Councillor Kelly Barber also supported the motion but questioned why the onus fell on the council not the government to arrange staff parking.
“I think it’s madness that our council’s having to get involved in something that really is probably an issue that government should have taken care of a long time ago,” he said.
“I mean, why would you build a house with no parking, if you know if there isn’t great public transport? Why would you build a hospital and have inadequate parking for your staff and for the people that visit?”
By Katie Todd of rnz.co.nz
