What has Liverpool’s “Place” NHS and Cheshire and Merseyside ICB done whilst maternity care nationally is in a well-publicised crisis and thousands of women are furious about the level of care they and their babies received? While the public enquiry into baby deaths at Countess of Chester has just opened? While Alderhey is at the centre of the Physician Associates scandal? While they can’t stop the next winter crisis, already upon our hospitals?

They announce the intention to fundamentally change Liverpool Women’s Hospital. This was without even a meeting with the organisations that have campaigned for a decade to keep the hospital and collected 75,000 signatures to keep the hospital on the Crown Street site as a women’s hospital for all our mothers, daughters, friends, lovers and for every precious baby.

The whole ICB is facing huge problems and does not have the resources to deliver safe A and E in the coming months. Yet, they think launching a discussion about merging Liverpool Women’s Hospital into one conglomerate of hospitals is sane and responsible.

This is the state of the Integrated Care Board, which is the controlling body for the NHS in Cheshire and Merseyside. It is from page 110 in the Board papers. A score of 20 in black means it is at the highest risk possible. They also said:

“There are currently no known plans for any additional funding to be allocated ahead of winter to support additional capacity and the expectation is that maintaining system flow through winter will need to be achieved through the delivery of these improvement plans.“

The document about Liverpool Women’s Hospital’s future can be found here. We will produce a detailed critique next week.

Maternity and women’s health need urgent changes, but they don’t include dispersing services and absorbing Liverpool Women’s Hospital into one giant conglomerate. We want to see the following changes nationally and locally.

1. Far better funding and staffing for maternity and an end to birth traumas.
2. More respect must be given to women giving birth and the women tending them in giving birth.
3. The funding currently given to insurance for maternity damages should be invested in the service to reduce those damages.
4. Women who need induction of labour should get that intervention in a safe and timely manner.
5. Fertility services must be fully available on the NHS, not the prerogative of the well-off.
6. Gynaecology services must be drastically improved, nationally and locally.
7. The NHS workforce must be given more respect, their workload improved, and the service must once more become a good place to work.
8. The whole NHS must be returned to being a national, fully publicly provided service, fully funded, repaired, and restored after all the damages of more than ten years of austerity and many forms of privatisation.
9. The public’s views must be respected – most women likely to use the hospital will be at work when this first meeting happens.
10. The research conducted at Liverpool Women’s Hospital must continue into key areas like endometriosis, menopause, and working to ensure our prem babies live and thrive despite being born very early.
11. Midwifery training must be made available to all without incurring huge debts.
12. Women’s health and healthcare must be given far more resources and respect.

Our petition, which is available on-line is at 44,656 signatures and more than 30,000 signatures on paper, 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 very best”

It has over seventy-five thousand signatures. The people of Liverpool have attended three big demonstrations to save the hospital. Campaigners have attended every board meeting of Liverpool Women’s Hospital since the petition was launched and every ICB meeting since that was formed. Yet we have never been invited to present our views. Promises of consultation made in public clearly meant nothing.

Liverpool Women’s Hospital is a tertiary centre, which means patients are referred there from other hospitals from the rest of Merseyside and Cheshire, the Isle of Man and parts of Wales. Keeping that provision and the reputation that goes with it is important. The provision for the babies in the neonatal unit, near their mums, matters too.

We have said for years that the NHS must change the maternity tariff, the amount of money paid to hospitals for delivering maternity care. Liverpool Women’s Hospital is the largest provider of maternity care and is badly hit by how low the tariff is. Liverpool Women’s Hospital runs a deficit because of this, and over the years appears to have made some bad decisions on staffing because of the financial problems. Many midwives left. Yet somehow,the document from the ICB says:

“The case for change is focussed solely on the clinical risks, issues and outcomes for people using hospital-based gynaecology and maternity services. It does not consider productivity or value for money.”

The ICB is in serious financial trouble yet it claims not to be considering money in this situation.

We say that right from the beginning, it has been about money. It was about the decision made nearly a decade ago to close one of the Liverpool Hospitals to save money at the cost of our health. It is also about disrespecting women’s health and women’s opinions.

“We’ve known for some time that the poorest households and women have shouldered the greatest burden of austerity measures.” Women’s health has suffered particularly in this time. Liverpool has seen some of the worst overall loss of healthcare. Yet we still kept Liverpool Women’s as a treasured service, where most of Liverpool’s babies are born and where great steps have been made in research. We said before and say it again “In these hard times. what we have we hold.”

Should we leave structural issues in our health care to “the professionals”? No way. The big managers of the NHS have caused havoc in the last ten years, implementing austerity, privatisation, and the move towards an American model. We have seen more than a decade of damage.

Remember the chaos of the building of Liverpool Royal, with fewer beds than the old one and now needing more, with chaos in the financing, construction, and demolition?

We call on the city of Liverpool to defend what we have in the NHS and to fight to improve the rest. No closures, no loss of services, no more mergers, no more outsourcing, no more overworked staff.

Please sign our petition here

Please attend any of the public meetings that you can get to. The first is this one:

When: 9th October 2024, 9.00am to 11.30am.

Where: Liverpool 1 Suite, Holiday Inn, Lime Street, Liverpool, L1 1NQ