Baxenden Bank
Established Member
- Joined
- 23 Oct 2013
- Messages
- 4,023
Attending ASAP and attending using public transport are very unlikely to be compatible. Save for a very small number of people who are fortunate enough to have a direct bus to the hospital running every few minutes 24/7/365. In the absence of a car, and an urgent need to attend, then the spouse / family / friend / neighbour option comes into play. Failing that a taxi, or as suggested, an NHS funded taxi in lieu of a non-emergency ambulance / patient transport service.A relative of mine was involved in a bad accident, he was taken to A&E and the hospital phoned his next of kin asking for her to attend the hospital ASAP. She had access to a car but what if she didn't? The doctors needed her to consent to an emergency procedure so if there had been no car or adequate public transport link that emergency procedure wouldn't have happened so soon. I don't know what the consequences of that would have been.
Don't misunderstand, I fully understand the need for people to attend various places. And for some of those to do so by public transport. I am one of them and there are so many places which it is simply no longer possible to reasonably reach by public transport. But, as was discussed upthread, people need to allow for such things in their life. Very occasionally things happen out of the blue which have unforeseen costs i.e. the need to attend a hospital a few times over a short period of time, then not again for several years. That could be as a patient or a visitor. Public transport, nowadays, simply cannot be provided on that basis unless the population density is sufficient to have enough of those 'once in a blue moon passengers' travelling on every bus service to make the subsidy at least reasonable.
My view would always be that the provider of a service should consider how its users are going to access their services. That applies to a place of employment, leisure, retail or health. Unfortunately we now live in a world where the people deciding on the locations of those facilities simply have no concept whatsoever that there still remain people in the world who do not have immediate access to a car for their sole use, as and when. Equally unfortunately, the numbers of such people are so few that the loss of their business can be easily afforded.