Concessions should also be offered to people with disabilities and NHS staff whose shift patterns mean they cannot use public transport.
Last month Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt told MPs costs were “just too high”.
Patients and families shouldn’t have to deal with the added stress of unfair parking charges”
The government is launching a recruitment drive to hire more doctors‘ assistants to try to help take pressure off a straining NHS under plans announced on Thursday.
The physician associates will have two years of intensive training instead of the seven completed by doctors, and will provide support in the diagnosis and management of patients in hospitals.
Mental health care is often described as the Cinderella of medicine – overlooked, disparaged, and generally neglected. In the UK, mental health care is the single biggest item on the NHS budget (£12.16bn in 2010/11), but in practice this means that only about 11% of the overall spend is allocated to deal with 23% of the disease burden. Recent cuts have also hit mental health care significantly harder than acute hospitals, creating a combination of falling capacity and rising demand. Mental healthcare appears to suffer from the same stigma in policy circles as individuals with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder experience in private life. And just as stigma leads to worse outcomes for individuals with mental health problems, the underfunding of mental health care leads to higher long-term costs for the NHS.
