The government has not yet decided whether to charge for parking at public hospitals, said Health Minister Datuk Seri Dr S Subramaniam Tuesday.

He said there was a proposal to privatise the management of the current car park in some of the public hospitals but no decision has been made yet.

"There was a proposal on this, in which the objective was to make sure that the car park can be managed better, but it is not going to be implemented tomorrow or anytime soon. Until such time, there's no need to be alarmed on this.

"But in some of the hospitals like the Kuala Lumpur Hospital, we have built a multi-storey car park and that is a privatised car park so the public have to pay a fee for that," he told a press conference after officiating at a bi-regional workshop on restricting the marketing of unhealthy food and non-alcoholic beverages to children in the Western Pacific and Southeast Asia here.

He was commenting on Deputy Health Minister Datuk Seri Dr Hilmi Yahaya's response in Parliament yesterday, which said the Ministry of Health had decided to charge for parking at hospitals in the central zone of the peninsula to avoid abuse of parking areas.

The four-day workshop, which began today and jointly organised by the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the Ministry of Health, is aimed to train public health officials, legal experts and consumer organisations on approaches to address food marketing to children.

He said the issues of charging people for parking at hospitals was a major issue and the government had to study the issue first before making any decision.

"In Sultanah Aminah Hospital, Johor Bahru for example, the management has been privatised because people who parked their car there go to work in Singapore and they come back the day after to take their car.

"Can you imagine a hospital car park filled with people who have gone to Singapore to work, and we thought we needed to do something to stop this and that explains the decision made," he said.