Save Liverpool Women’s Hospital News May 2024.

Liverpool Women’s Hospital will not get a new building on the Royal Site. This announcement has been expected for some time. The BBC covered the story this week. On Radio Merseyside our campaign was asked to comment. We said that we were not surprised . The Hospital should stay on the Crown Street site and that what matters is proper funding, staffing, and resources because our babies deserve the best.

Our huge petition says.

Save the Liverpool Women’s Hospital.

No closure. No privatisation. No cuts. No merger.

Reorganise the funding structures, not the hospital.

Our babies and mothers, our sick women, deserve the best.

What’s happening with the  Liverpool Women’s Hospital?

There has been a press announcement that there will be no new women’s hospital built on the Royal site in the near future.

This announcement does not mean the future of Liverpool Women’s Hospital is safe, far from it. Public consultation about its future will be launched shortly.

The announcement is not a surprise to anyone who has followed the story of Liverpool Women’s Hospital or the story of broken promises from the Government about building new hospitals, even those in dire physical conditions.

For example in Leeds, the people were promised a new Children’s Hospital. In the meantime, services were dispersed to different hospitals to allow demolition. Now the new Hospital is not going to happen.

Nationally, maternity is underfunded and understaffed and has seen terrible scandals. We have written much about this in other posts.  Just this week there was a report about delayed induction of labour across the country (and this also has been seen in Liverpool Women’s Hospital). The Care Quality Commission reported “The quality of maternity, mental health and ambulance services has seen a “notable decline” over the last year, which is contributing to “unfair care” and worsening health inequalities,”

The Health Service Journal  also reported that

“families whose babies died and whose mothers were harmed – in some cases dying – in the East Kent maternity scandal were still having to prove legal liability to get any compensation. This is despite Bill Kirkup’s report, published around 18 months ago, having already looked at their cases in detail and reached conclusions on whether better care could have led to different outcomes.

But NHS Resolution, which handles the NHS’s clinical negligence claims, says causation and a breach of duty of care will need to be proved in each case. This may mean families have to engage not just lawyers but also experts in midwifery, obstetrics, and neonatal care.”

In such a national maternity crisis we must protect the services we have in the area. We say women and babies will be harmed if the Liverpool Women’s Hospital is forced into a merger with the huge general hospital. The focus on women and babies will be lost. The great maternity scandals of our age have happened where there was no real focus on women and babies.

The government and the NHS bureaucracy have wanted to close one hospital in Liverpool since 2015. Liverpool Women’s Hospital was chosen. This is to do with saving money not patient care.

Liverpool Women’s Hospital sits on a great site on Crown Street. The official opening was on 7th November 1995 and the building is in good condition. A £20million pound neonatal unit was recently added to the hospital. It does not need a rebuild.

Liverpool Women’s Hospital does need more staff and additional resources like a proper blood service, an improved emergency medicine service, a 24/7 consultant obstetric presence. It needs to tackle the long waiting list for Gynaecology treatment,  and improved intensive care. All of this requires funding and support from the national health service and government funding but without that funding our babies and mothers will suffer. The money must be provided.

All hospitals should be run in a cooperative system with other hospitals but specialisms should be protected.

Liverpool Women’s Hospital, along with the whole of the UK, needs to improve infant mortality, maternal mortality and injuries to women and babies and to tackle gross inequalities.

Serious damage has been done to our health care. We see it in the terrible waiting times in Accident and Emergency, in the 14,000 preventable deaths caused by those A and E problems, we see it in dentistry, in the GP service, in mental health and in maternity. We see it in the eight million people on waiting lists. We see it in the exhausted staff.

The experience women have giving birth is getting worse because of these underlying, national problems and the day-to-day stress this brings into the hospital.

Liverpool Women’s Hospital is damaged too by the business model imposed on the hospitals. The drive to privatise and to move away from a service model in the NHS has caused problems all this century.

The new Chief Executive (James Sumner) and Chair of Liverpool Women’s Hospital (David Flory) are also the Chief Executive and Chair of the Royal, Aintree and Broadgreen Hospitals (Liverpool University  Hospitals Foundation Trust). Neither man is a specialist in maternal or infant health. The Health Service Journal has said these joint appointments are likely to lead to a merger of Liverpool Women’s with the big hospital. We say no to a merger, and a big yes to cooperation between all the hospitals in the area. Such cooperation is anathema to the privatisers. We need continued support from the people of Liverpool to win this fight and we need to link up with other maternity campaigners.

Please help Save Liverpool Women’s Hospital. Sign the petition, talk to friends family and workplaces about this, join the discussion, and help with leafleting and social media.

Invite us to speak to your organisation.

 Send us a donation.

 For all our mothers, sisters, daughters, friends, and lovers and for every baby