The Burnett staff parking lot is about one kilometre from Kelowna General Hospital. Work on the site is planned to make it more useable.

(ROB MUNRO / iNFOnews.ca)

Even though it can take staff five to six years to get a parking pass at Kamloops and Kelowna hospitals, no one seems to mind the walk from distant parking lots.

Interior Health is in the process of providing more staff parking spots in both Kamloops and Kelowna but, despite staff comments to iNFOnews.ca that walking to distant parking lots is frightening, especially on dark winter nights, hardly anyone calls for the available shuttle services.

“We have offered a shuttle service in the past between the Burnett lot and Kelowna General Hospital and, I have to tell you, the uptake on that was minimal,” Lorne Sisley, corporate director for facilities management and operations for Interior Health told iNFOnews.ca.

The Burnett lot is a dirt parking area at the near Ethel Street and Glenwood Avenue, about a kilometre away from the hospital, or about a 10 to 12 minute walk.

The shuttle originally ran on a schedule then went to on-call.

“There finally was a point where we ended it just because there were actually no requests,” Sisley said.

Similarly, a shuttle service for Royal Inland Hospital staff in Kamloops, which is on-call, is rarely used.

“The last time it got used was in February,” Sisley said. “We had two calls for it. Since then, there have been no requests.”

Back in the winter of 2021, nurses told harrowing stories to their union president about being harassed on the streets.

“I was walking to my car after 11 p.m. and I had a guy come up to me and put his arms around me and ask me where I was going,” one Kelowna nurse wrote. “I had to elbow him and tell him to get away from me.”

READ MORE: New nurses face up to nine-year wait to get parking spots at Interior hospitals

While Kelowna General Hospital has a “safe walk” program where security officers will walk with staff, that stops outside hospital property.

“As far as the safety of walking on streets, we will make the assumption the City of Kelowna takes care of all our streets for all pedestrians, not just our staff,” Sisley said.

A recent email from Interior Health says the wait list for a staff daytime parking pass is six years in Kelowna and five in Kamloops, but that may not tell the whole story, Sisley said.

“The challenge we have with the wait list is that people have waited so long that, when we do get stalls that free up because staff retire or whatever other circumstances, we may go down the wait list fairly quickly for a period of time because some people who are on the wait list, they may no longer be with the organization,” he said.

For that reason, he can’t say how many months or years will be chopped off the wait lists with two new parking areas in the works.

First up, there will be 115 additional staff parking passes available at Royal Inland Hospital’s new Gaglardi Tower, scheduled to open next week.

That’s based on 1.75 passes per parking stall because of shift work, the email from Interior Health says.

In Kelowna, Interior Health spent $10.2 million earlier this year to buy a 1.7-acre vacant lot across Pandosy Street from the hospital. It will, eventually, will be turned into a parking lot.

Designing the site is being done in consultation with the neighbourhood association, Sisley said. It’s hoped that it will be completed by the end of the year but it may not be started until next spring, given supply chain issues.

It’s likely to have about 130 parking stalls for staff, which works out to about $77,000 per stall just for the land costs.

That will add to the 707 on-site stalls (some in a parkade) and 260 off-site for a total of more than 1,000.

There are 462 on-site and 200 off-site parking stalls for staff of Royal Inland Hospital, Sisley said.

The new Kelowna parking lot is a temporary measure as the land is expected to, eventually, be used for hospital expansion.

At one time, Interior Health had a second staff parkade in its plans but that was scrapped in 2021.

READ MORE: Interior Health, City of Kelowna appear headed for a parking showdown

At this point, there are no plans to expand public parking at Kelowna General, Sisley said. Once the new surface parking lot is finished, a traffic study will likely be done to see if there’s a need to expand public parking.

There are 468 public parking stalls in Kelowna and 402 in Kamloops.

It’s also possible that a scheduled shuttle service will be tried again for the Burnett parking lot in Kelowna, which will be graded to make it more useable and enlarged by removing a building and three portables at the site.

Whether there will ever come a day when wait lists for staff parking are more manageable comes down, in part, to balancing of needs.

“That’s probably a taxpayer conversation as well,” Sisley said. “How much do we put into more parking at the sites versus looking at other investments that we should be doing for health care?”

He noted that cities are encouraging alternative means of transportation, such as transit and cycling, rather than just adding more parking.

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