Some health-care workers at Kingston General Hospital (KGH) are asking the city and Queen’s University to help them with their parking woes as they deal with COVID-19 patients during the third wave.
Global News spoke to several health-care workers Monday who are asking for a variety of measures that might help ease a little stress while going to work on the front lines of the worst time during the pandemic.
Although there is currently only one local person being treated for COVID-19 in a local intensive care unit (ICU), KGH’s critical care beds have been at or near capacity in the past few weeks, in part due to patients being flown in from overflowing ICUs elsewhere in Ontario.
Kingston Health Sciences Centre said as of Monday, it was treating 44 COVID-19 patients from outside the region at KGH. Last week, when treating around 20 COVID-19 patients, Kingston Health Sciences Centre said its ICUs were at times full.
Global News spoke to two Kingston ICU nurses who asked to remain anonymous due to fear of reprisal for speaking out. They said many working in the ICU are exhausted, on edge and are just looking for some temporary relief from something that can be influenced on a local level — parking.
Patient care assistant Cari Hodgson said she and many of her colleagues feel the same.
“Paying for parking is, I can’t say that’s the biggest issue. It’s finding parking coming in for a 12-hour shift, having to come in extra early to find parking. Having to walk, I don’t know, anywhere from 10, 15, 20 minutes sometimes to get to our car, to get back from our car, going out to constantly feed the meter, which is an issue in itself,” Hodgson said.
This was something echoed by the two ICU nurses. They said they have been parking at Kingston Penitentiary and walking down to the hospital. They said their already grueling 12-hours shifts are turning into 13 and even 14 hours with the added parking issues and screening to get inside.
Last year, as the pandemic hit, both the city and Queen’s University offered free parking in order to help alleviate pressures prompted by the pandemic.
But, for the Kingston region, hospital demands remained low until recently, when Ontario started shipping COVID-19 patients to Kingston from overflowing ICUs across the province.
As of now, there are several options when it comes to parking near KGH, most of which are Queen’s University parking lots or city streets. There is a designated lot for hospital workers, but a permit for that lot can take years.
Each comes with its own struggles. The underground parking garage run by Queen’s University with entrances across the hospital on Stuart Street runs as high as $20 a day.
“If you’re working every day. That’s a huge chunk of our paycheck and not all of us at the hospital make top dollar,” said Hodgson.
Because most students are not studying on campus this year, many of the Queen’s parking lots are under-used, but Hodgson says she believes hospital workers are still not allowed to use them.
“We can’t park there without a parking pass and parking passes for KGH are not valid with Queens… I’ve parked there and I’ve gotten tickets,” she said.
Queen’s, on the other hand, says there is a temporary allowance for health-care workers to be able to use its surface lots for just over $100 a month, which is the same rate the offered to Queen’s staff. Queen’s has yet to answer when this offer was put into place, but the school says this information has been shared with Kingston Health Sciences Centre and the city to be shared with local health-care workers.
As for on-street parking, which is regulated by the city, it is available for three-hour stints on many streets around the hospital, which means health-care workers have to run out to feed the meter and move their cars to find another hard-come-by spot.
Also, Hodgson says on-street parking still racks up to close to $15 a day.
The truth is that parking near the hospital has always been difficult for local health-care workers, Hodgson says.
“It’s just gotten worse since the pandemic because now it’s it’s become just an extra stressor for all of us,” she said.
Mayor Bryan Paterson said he has heard concerns from local health-care workers and will be putting forward a motion to provide a free, monthly parking permit to health-care workers working at KGH, and to ask Queen’s to do the same. He says this will be at a city-owned lot and, hopefully, one that Queen’s owns as well.
“Let’s face it, right now our doctors and nurses and hospital workers are going through a tremendously challenging time right now. They’re carrying a heavy load. They’re caring for many patients in the ICU. And so if there’s a way that the city can come alongside and help support them at this moment, I think that that’s important,” Paterson said.
Paterson said he spoke to Queen’s principal Patrick Deane Monday to see how the school can co-ordinate such an offer, but Queen’s has yet to comment on providing any kind of permit.
Still, Paterson said he will not be proposing the exact same measures as seen last year.
“One of the things that we found was that by doing that, there weren’t spaces for cancer patients or dialysis patients. So we’re going to take a bit of a more targeted approach this time,” Paterson said.