A worried wife was not laughing when she returned to a Ninewells Hospital car park on April 1 and found a parking charge notice on her windscreen.
Betty McGregor was visiting her 68-year-old husband David, who had suffered a heart attack earlier that day, when the notice was left on her car.
Mrs McGregor, who lives in Dundee, is a former GP practice manager and spent almost 20 years working in the health service locally until she took early retirement last year.
As soon as her husband walked back into the house on April 1, after being out for a walk with the dog, she recognised the signs of a heart attack.
“He said he had a pain in his chest and he was sweating profusely,” Mrs McGregor said. “I put him in the car and took him up to the hospital and they just admitted him there and then.
“I was terrified. I just thought this man I have been married to for 40 odd years is going to check out right in front of me.”
As it turned out the heart attack was not life-threatening and Mr McGregor is now back home.
However, Mrs McGregor has received a letter saying her parking charge stands after she challenged the claim she failed to display a ticket when she parked in a hospital car park on April 1.
Her challenge was immediate when she found the notice on her windscreen.
“I marched straight up to the car parking office,” she said. “It was somewhere after eight o’clock in the evening.
“The place was lit up and the radio was blaring but there was nobody there. I wrote a wee note on the back of the parking charge notice and put it under the door with my ticket.”Valid ticketHer note stated that she had bought a valid parking ticket and displayed it on her windscreen, pointing out it had an expiry time of 8am the following day.
Mrs McGregor is adamant the ticket was stuck on her windscreen when she returned to the car and had not fallen off. She says she is in the habit of tucking such tickets into the door pillar between the front windscreen and the driver’s window to make sure they don’t fall off.
A letter from the private firm Vinci Park, which operates the Ninewells car parks on behalf of NHS Tayside, says the notice will be upheld and is an exact copy of the letter sent to William McMichael in Arbroath. He challenged a notice given to him when he was visiting his wife, who is battling cancer.
Both letters were signed on behalf of Vinci Park’s contract manager Gordon Brown, who is based at Ninewells.
“It is a bog standard letter,” said Mrs McGregor said. “We are at the mercy of these people.”
Mr Brown said on Monday he had just returned to work after getting married and had not dealt with either of the appeals to have the parking charge withdrawn. He said he would look into both cases.
“It is our policy that we seek to be as sensitive as possible to everyone,” he said.