Hospitals offer free parking over Christmas period

Hospitals in a city will be relaxing parking charges during the Christmas period.

People visiting patients in Hinchingbrooke Hospital in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire, and Peterborough City Hospital will be able to park for free on Christmas Day, Boxing Day and New Year's Day.

Joanne Bennis, the chief nurse at North West Anglia NHS Foundation Trust which runs the hospitals, said the trust "wanted to make it as easy as possible for people to visit over Christmas".

This follows the trust's decision to extend visiting hours across hospitals from 11:00 GMT to 20:00 GMT.

Ms Bennis said: "Our ward teams do a great job in making Christmas in hospital as festive as possible for our patients, but there is nothing quite like seeing their loved ones to give our patients a lift.

"We wanted to make it as easy as possible for people to visit over Christmas and this comes on the back of our recent extension to visiting hours from 11:00 to 20:00 as standard across most wards, which will continue.

"I would, however, like to remind people not to visit hospital if they are unwell themselves.

"This helps us protect our patients from viruses such as flu and norovirus, which are much more easily spread at this time of year."

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