Patients checking into most hospitals are not permitted to get ill until their cars are parked and their insurance forms are filled out.
But Good Samaritan Hospital in Downers Grove has eased at least part of the pain while undergoing its expansion.
Patients now pull up to the hospital’s main door at 3815 Highland Ave. and leave their cars right there. Instead of a ticket, they get a “thank you” from a valet.
The free service is offered to all patients while the hospital continues its $8.5 million expansion. The hospital is doubling the size of its existing 7,000-square-foot emergency treatment area, and construction sites and vehicles have eaten up about 60 percent of the medical center’s existing parking areas, officials said.
Rather than force patients to search fruitlessly for non-existent parking spaces, the valet service should keep stress at a minimum and help avoid traffic snarls, officials added.
Once the emergency area addition is completed later this fall, the hospital will add a professional building, a parking garage and an outpatient area at a cost of $21.5 million.