PATIENTS and visitors who have to put up with "intolerable" queues at York District Hospital have been given some good news, as long-awaited plans for a new multi-storey car park are due to go before council planners.

The plans will be ready for submission by next spring, according to health chiefs in the city.

Visitors and patients often endure long queues in Wigginton Road in order to get into the hospital site and they are sometimes made late for their appointments.

But the annual meeting of the York Health Services NHS Trust, held at the hospital yesterday, heard that the crisis could soon be alleviated.

A full planning application to build a deck on top of the hospital's existing car park, creating a two-floor car park, is expected to be submitted to City of York Council early next year.

The scheme could create up to 200 extra car parking spaces.

Trust chairman Alan Maynard said: "We've had this situation for about five years of quite intolerable queuing, with patients arriving in outpatients extremely agitated because they are turning up late for their appointments.

"This new car park level should create 150 or 200 spaces - we don't know quite how many yet.

"It will be complex, there are all sorts of environmental issues regarding pollution and the city does have a travel plan that we want to be supportive of, but we are determined to get that improvement in place and hopefully it will be there next year."

Simon Pleydell, chief executive of the trust, said the proposal would be ready by spring next year and would provide a better service to patients and visitors.

Delayed discharges at York District Hospital have been slightly reduced, down to 50 this week, from 56 last week. Mr Pleydell told the annual meeting that there was a "willingness from all parties to reduce this issue", and that he felt more confident that the problem was being addressed. But he said it was vital that beds continued to be freed up as quickly as possible.

The number of acute beds blocked by patients who no longer needed hospital care reached 65 in July.

Updated: 10:44 Friday, September 27, 2002