Drivers are regularly leaving their cars at hospital and GP car parks in Marlow before heading into the town centre to go shopping – prompting fears some elderly residents may not be able to attend important appointments.

Buckinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust (BHT) has launched an investigation into parking at Marlow Community Hospital, in Victoria Road, in a bid to stop drivers from taking advantage of the free parking.

Marlow town councillor, Suzanne Brown, said a patient’s car was recently blocked in for three hours at the GP surgery, after numerous attempts to find the driver responsible were unsuccessful.

Cllr Brown raised concerns the NHS does not have the time or resources to tackle the issue – adding shoppers who use the car parks could be putting someone’s health at risk.

She said: “The problem is the GP surgery doesn’t have the resources to stand in the car park and make sure everyone is visiting the surgery.

“If an elderly lady can’t park and can’t walk to the surgery then they will struggle to get there. It’s a difficult one because there are limited resources.

“You could get volunteers to man the car park, but that’s going to be difficult to do.

“The problem is even if you get an external company to come and man the car park it is expensive. It’s bad enough when people park in a pub car park and go elsewhere, but this is a matter of life or death.”

The issue was raised during Bucks County Council’s health and social select committee this week – where chief executive of BHT, Neil Macdonald, said more needs to be done to tackle the problem.

He said: “We want to make it convenient for people to get [to the hospital], but we don’t want to make it so convenient that people park there and do their shopping in town, which happens these sites.

“This is going to start becoming problematic, so we are going to have to find a way to counteract that.”

A spokesman for BHT said work is due to be carried out in the coming weeks “to assess the extent of the problem”.

The spokesman said: “Parking at our community sites is limited and we’ve had anecdotal feedback from patient groups that because parking is currently free, there have been cases of people either parking there to go and do their shopping or leaving their car there for the day whilst they go to work.

“Over the coming weeks we will be doing a piece of work to assess the extent of the problem.

“If we find that our patients are being adversely affected and unable to park at our community sites because of these issues, then we will talk to representatives from the local League of Friends, as well as our stakeholder groups, to see how best we can address them.”