FN Plzeň will pay 150 million for a new parking garage for 400 cars

author: LT projekt, Brno

Plzeň - By the end of the year, the Plzeň Teaching Hospital intends to start building a new parking structure within the Lochotín complex. The four-story building will be intended for staff vehicles. Once they start parking their cars there, it will free up spaces in the hospital's outdoor parking lots for patients and their companions. The parking structure is expected to cost around 150 million crowns, which the hospital will fully fund with its own resources. It could be completed by mid-next year, said Václav Šimánek, director of the largest healthcare facility in western Bohemia, to ČTK.
    "Parking is a painful issue for the Plzeň Teaching Hospital," he admitted. When the Lochotín complex began to be designed and later constructed in 1978, there were not as many cars among the people. No one anticipated that the hospital would eventually grow so large, Šimánek stated. Although there are 1300 parking spaces within the complex and in the nearby outdoor parking lots, all of them are hopelessly occupied from early morning.
    "Patients arriving around nine or ten o'clock have a hard time getting to the hospital," the director noted. The hospital's outpatient departments perform nearly a million treatments each year, and doctors hospitalize another 77,000 patients annually. Although public transport buses stop in front of the hospital, a large number of patients travel by car. On busy days, several thousand patients converge on the hospital in the morning, Šimánek said.
    In addition to preparing the parking building, the hospital is also negotiating with the first municipal district regarding the reconstruction of asphalt and unpaved parking lots.
    The Plzeň Teaching Hospital has 1689 beds across its facilities in the Bory and Lochotín districts. The hospital's annual turnover was 5.472 billion crowns last year. Thanks to good management, the hospital plans several large investments. With state funding, it will build a surgical pavilion by 2020 for 1.5 billion crowns, where it will cover about 30 percent of the cost. It is also constructing a heliport for 44 million crowns, 14 million of which it will pay. For the recently completed reconstruction of the Clinic of Anesthesia, Resuscitation, and Intensive Care costing 45 million crowns, the hospital paid 20 million from its own funds.