Better bus services across the city would improve hospital access for the city’s most vulnerable residents, a councillor has said.
Councillor Angela Argenzio, Chair of the Adult Health and Social Care Policy Committee at Sheffield City Council, wants to combine the fight for a better bus service with hospital access to improve adult health and social care.
She said: “When you reach Northern General on a bus, you either drop at the bottom or the top. It’s a huge site so if you’re an elderly person who’s going for a visit, it’s not easy and it’s a really difficult site to navigate anyway.
“The distances are huge and there’s a lot of vehicles so it’s not particularly pleasant to walk through it so I would like to see some kind of transport system on the hospital site.”
According to Sheffield City Council transport statistics, 45 per cent of households in Sheffield do not own a car, leaving them reliant on public transport.
Coun Argenzio said: “The NHS does a lot of work in trying to get people access through other modes of transport, but there are certainly a number of appointments that are missed because of public transport issues.”
While the city council does not have powers to improve buses, the South Yorkshire Mayoral Authority’s campaign ‘Fight for a fair deal’ is a cross party campaign designed to tackle this “because good transport is important”.
Coun Argenzio told ShefNews that this would not only improve adult health but also social care as transport can contribute to the decrease in isolation.
She said: “There’s parts of Sheffield that are rural and the transport to those areas is shocking.
“Therefore the elderly people who live in those areas are isolated.”
The pollution and congestion that would be avoided from a better bus service would also lower the deaths caused by air pollution.
Coun Argenzio said: “When we talk about air pollution it’s not because we want to stop people using cars, it’s because 500 people a year in Sheffield die because of pollution with respiratory problems and that is an excess of deaths.”