THE PROBLEM of parking at Winchester's Royal Hampshire County Hospital has reached crisis point.

Hospital chiefs say it is so bad that some staff are forced to hang around for 30 minutes or more just to find a space.

However, in a bid to ease the congestion, Winchester and Eastleigh Healthcare NHS Trust is promising a new travel plan.

Currently, more than 76 per cent of the hospital's 3,000-plus staff travel to work on their own in cars, and with shifts at the hospital overlapping, staff arriving for later shifts often have great difficulty finding one of the 1,203 spaces.

Of those, some 300 are available for patients and visitors, but many of these groups also find it hard to find a space at the hospital, especially during the most popular visiting times.

Now several initiatives aimed at reducing the number of people travelling by car have been unveiled.

First there will be greater incentives for car-sharing between staff, with those making the effort getting free parking in guaranteed spaces as a reward - currently it costs staff 30p a day to park.

Staff are also being encouraged to use Hampshire County Council's free public transport journey planner, which allows users to plot exactly which buses will carry them from home to work.

Another possibility will be the setting up of a dedicated park-and-ride service for staff or visitors needing to drive to Winchester but willing to leave their vehicles on the outskirts.

However, if all of these fail to tackle the problems, bosses at the trust are not ruling out further punitive disincentives to force people to change their travelling habits.