With the return of many services at various Nova Scotia Health Authority facilities across the province, parking fees will also return.
The NSHA’s Brendan Elliott says the money raised from those fees is important to the hospitals, bringing in $10 million a year across the province.
“Every bit of that money goes back into patient services, whether we’re talking about courses for doctors, whether it’s equipment that is valuably needed within the hospital.”
Yarmouth Regional brought in $700,000 in the last fiscal year, which has paid for things like stretcher mattresses, patient ceiling lifts, blood collection chairs, even translation apps for over two hundred different languages for ER staff.
He says parking fees vary from facility to facility and, for those who use these parking lots frequently, there are programs in place to help.
“In Yarmouth, there are pre-paid parking passes. On a monthly basis, you pay twenty-five dollars and it’s unlimited, the number of times you come and go from the hospital. Check in with the administration office at your hospital and find out what options are there.”
Elliott says parking fees were temporarily eliminated to help during the worst of the pandemic.
“This is one of those things we offered to staff and patients during the pandemic because we recognized that anyone who needed to go to the hospital, whether they were staff, doctors, patients, they were going under trying circumstances. Anything we could do at that time to make the experience a little less stressful, we wanted to.”
Patients and public will still have to enter the Yarmouth Hospital through the front, north entrance on the Vancouver Street side of the building, as the rear-south entrance, on the harbour side of the building, is locked and only for staff and physicians.
