Royal Preston Hospital introducing extra visiting slot and free park and ride shuttle service to help ease car parking chaos

People can now visit their loved ones at the hospital from 1 – 3pm daily. This is in addition to the existing 6 – 7pm arrangements at both Royal Preston Hospital, and Chorley and South Ribble Hospital.

The minibus service will run from 12-15 – 4pm, Monday – Friday, allowing visitors to park free of charge at Preston Business Centre and make a direct five-minute shuttle journey to the main entrance at Royal Preston Hospital. There is no specialised disabled access onto the minibus so blue badge holders are encouraged to continue parking on site at the hospital. Eight disabled spaces are located on visitor car park B outside the main entrance.

NHS bosses hope the new changes will help to ease pressures on its car parks on weekday afternoons after clearing away 15 disabled parking spaces, which dropped from 79 to 64 to make way for the new Covid hub.

The Nightingale Surge Hub typically uses around 40 beds daily, equating to two wards worth of patients.

A Lancashire Teaching Hospitals spokesperson said: “The additional capacity that the Nightingale is providing is helping the wider system to manage discharges more effectively and providing additional resilience to help de-escalate pressures, particularly in our Emergency Departments, at an exceptionally busy time.

“The extra beds are also helping us to free up room elsewhere within our hospitals, giving us the opportunity to better focus our efforts on elective recovery and to begin to reduce the long-waits that some of our patients will have experienced which have been exacerbated by the pandemic.”

Visiting arrangements to the hospital must be made directly with the ward with patients being supported to receive one visitor per day lasting a maximum of one hour.

If the above times do not suit the ward or visitor or patient requirements then alternative timings can be made.

Full visiting details, including further exemptions, are available at https://www.lancsteachinghospitals.nhs.uk/visiting-times