A BASINGSTOKE resident has hit out at the trust which runs Basingstoke hospital for “coning off the vast majority” of disabled parking spaces.

On Thursday, July 29, Steve Wares was at Basingstoke hospital to take his daughter to a physiotherapy appointment.

The 39-year-old from Worting suffers from multiple health issues and joint pain, and was “incredibly frustrated” to notice that there were limited parking spaces.

“Knowing that the physio unit is on a floor near the main car park, we headed that way to utilise the drop off area,” he explained.

“We had to pass the main blue badge or disabled access parking area when I noticed that all but three spaces had been coned off with no notice stating why.

“Usually there are roughly 25-30 spaces in the area but these are quite often blocked by the mobile scanning truck unit.”

Although he decided not to park up this time, Steve expressed his disappointment at the lack of accessible spaces.

He continued: “If I had to park, I could only get in the main car park which would mean walking away from the hospital to get on a path to avoid the steps. As I have problems with hips, pelvis and knees I find slopes and stairs painful to negotiate and experience pain walking more than 100m, which would make me very late for an appointment and in a lot of pain too.

“I found it incredibly frustrating that the people running the hospital think it is acceptable to do this to people already having a daily struggle with their own lives and that's before the distress, anger and anxiety of having to deal with finding a space and not missing an appointment you've had to wait months for.”

Steve added that he understands “exceptional circumstances like Covid” meant that the hospital had to have a temporary building in place, taking up a lot of spaces, but said he felt “this shouldn't be an issue now”.

However, when asked why the spaces had been blocked off, the hospital trust told the Gazette that it is actually working to increase the number of disabled parking spaces, which may explain the coned off areas noticed by Steve.

A spokesperson at Hampshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust said: “Providing outstanding hospital experience to our patients is our top priority. As such, we have undertaken some works to improve and increase disabled parking bays for our patients and visitors.

“These improvement works and changes are part of our COVID recovery plans and restoration of our hospital services. The works will increase parking capacity for disabled patients by creating ten additional disabled spaces in the main visitor car park. Moreover, the large area of disabled bays by the ‘A Level’ entrance is being reconfigured to accommodate a further three bays.

“Additional disabled bays have also been marked adjacent to the MRI and Therapies.”