How can ANPR assist the healthcare sector? The healthcare sector has never been busier. Any steps that can be taken to streamline services, save time and improve the support offered to staff and patient needs to be considered. While it’s easy to overlook the car park, automatic number plate recognition or ANPR can be a huge help. By effectively managing what’s going on outside your hospital, clinic, or surgery you can make life easier for everyone who walks through your doors, whether that’s for treatment or work. Explore more Provide space Car parks within the healthcare sector need to accommodate multiple people, visitors, patients, and staff. If a car park is being misused, either with unauthorised parking, parking in the wrong areas or people overstaying after their appointment, a site can quickly become overcrowded, leading to congestion, queues, and complaints. ANPR helps to put an end to the abuse that a car park can suffer from. By enforcing the rules on your site it’s possible to eliminate instances of spaces being misused, this frees up space, easing congestion, reducing traffic issues, and preventing complaints relating to your parking. Improving space availability and eliminating parking issues makes it easier for patients and visitors to find a space at your facility. Whenever someone is visiting a healthcare site they are often preoccupied with the reason for their visit. By making parking easier, you help to put people at ease as they arrive on-site, which is a fantastic foundation for continuing patient and visitor support. Protect services Providing space only goes so far, there are crucial spaces on a car park, from Blue Badge spaces to ambulance bays. These are there to protect services and provide enhanced parking for those who need it. Blocking access to services or priority parking for patients is detrimental to a healthcare site. Ambulance Bays are there so in an emergency a site can be accessed, if someone’s parked there that shouldn’t be it delays access to urgent care, which can be catastrophic. Specialised parking such as Blue Badge or Parent & Child bays are there to help visitors get to appointments on time and keep clinics and procedures running efficiently. Missed or late appointments cost the healthcare sector billions every year and the knock-on effect impacts everyone else using that service as a late appointment creates further delays for other people. A solution like Bay Enforcement helps keep those crucial areas free by applying ANPR to specific points on a car park. A monitoring bollard provides an extra level of control over individual spaces and creates a strong deterrent that makes people reconsider where they park, keeping spaces available for the visitors that need them. In turn this protects efficiency, accessibility and enhances the overall visitor experience for your healthcare site. Become part of the community As we mentioned, congestion can cause traffic issues. If left unchecked these issues can spill from your car park into the surrounding area. While on-street parking doesn’t sound like a cause for concern around healthcare sites it can prove problematic. In residential areas it can make access difficult and cause tension with the local community, the exact opposite of what a local health centre would be looking to achieve. On larger sites such as hospitals, it can make roads narrower and cause congestion. If this spills onto the route’s ambulances take in and out of the hospital this can be a potential risk to people’s health. Correcting this through better managed parking can ease potential community tensions and ensure that ambulances and other emergency vehicles can quickly and safely reach their destinations. Support staff A major issue for many healthcare sites is staff parking. When space is limited, and staff and patients are sharing a car park it’s important that your space turnover is efficient to limit congestion. On larger sites, you need to take steps to ensure that your staff parking is protected so that your teams can arrive for shifts on time and without a stressful parking experience. One way to achieve this is through a permit system. This allows you to allocate staff parking based on shifts, fuel types or other specific needs. Powered by ANPR systems this helps to ensure your staff parking is managed efficiently, reassures employees that they will have space to park and can even be automated. By allocating permits and managing changes via the cloud it’s possible to remove a major admin headache for your internal teams. Or fuel analysis data might reveal that an increasing number of vehicles on a car park are electric. This might prompt discussions around whether to add EV charging to a site. Analysing data can guide decision making, allowing a site to make improvements that improve the patient experience and demonstrate an ability to keep the patient at the forefront of everything a healthcare facility does, even improving the car park. Support patients ANPR empowers your site allowing you to better support your patients. From cameras registering number plates and sending notifications to internal staff letting them know an appointment has arrived, to click & assist services, where notifications are sent to porters and other internal teams, letting them know someone who needs additional help is in the car park. These services provide your patients with an extra level of support, enhancing the level of care they receive. This also helps to underpin a sense of quality around your facility, which can continue to reassure patients and ease any anxieties they might have about their appointment. Understand your car park ANPR does so much more than track a number plate. The insight and analysis it can provide can transform how you view your car park and plan for its future. From payment analysis helping you to see whether you need to introduce cashless and contactless options, to fuel analysis helping you to understand if you need to invest in electric vehicle charging bays. Data and insight allow you to see how your car park is not only performing but how it is evolving in the face of changing user requirements. Tracking this can help you ensure your car park is always delivering on its full potential. How can we help you make more of your parking? A car park is a major asset that can often go overlooked. In reality, it is a tool with a huge amount of potential that, if used correctly, can transform how a healthcare site operates. At Parkingeye we work alongside healthcare businesses to find the right combination of solutions to transform their parking. See how we’ve helped other healthcare sites here
