Our next event is the ‘Human Billboard’ on International Women’s Day (March 8th). Please do come if you can. Commercial services can buy space on the many billboards around the city. We don’t have that money, so we thought it would be good to have supporters holding up banners on International Women’s Day, on the pavement outside Liverpool Women’s Hospital on the junction of Crown Street and Parliament Street. If you would like to come, make your own banner or hold one of the printed ones. Traditionally, International Women’s Day is celebrated with Bread and Roses, so feel free to bring flowers, cakes and dates. Some gentler music would be good too.

Then, on March 13th, everyone is invited to a citizen’s assembly called by Ian Byrne MP on the issue of the future of the Liverpool Women’s Hospital, at the Joseph Lappin Centre, Mill Lane, Old Swan, Liverpool. Again, the ICB will be invited, as will our campaign.

We await the next stage in the plans for Liverpool Women’s Hospital. Maternity services across the country have been severely damaged, and we campaign, with other Maternity campaigns, for a Maternity service fully staffed with properly qualified staff and much better outcomes for all mothers and babies. We are keeping a record of the reports on the problems in Maternity here. We are angry to see the greater risks to poor, Black, and Asian babies born in the NHS and the greater risk to poor, Black, and Asian mothers, and we make our call for better services and active anti-racism in their name, too.

We are forever grateful to the women and men who work in our healthcare, holding our lives and our bodies in their hands and working in unnecessarily tough conditions; a key demand of our campaign is to make the NHS a great place to work. Never a week goes by without our campaign getting messages saying how wonderful NHS staff have been that week and how tough the situations have been in the hospitals. We all deserve better. We supported the health workers’ picket lines and will continue that support in the future.

Overworked staff cannot possibly provide the very best treatment. Birth trauma for mothers is a very real problem. Liverpool Women’s Hospital is one of very few Maternity units that has the approved level of staffing, but no one is fool enough to say that the current birth rate+ level is a desirable staffing level, it’s a minimum level. Our mothers and our babies deserve the very best. At present our service is not as good as other advanced European nations.

Gynaecology has also been badly damaged by years of cuts. This report was produced for Parliament. The situation is well-known and must be addressed.

Investing in healthcare has a huge return for the health and wealth of the country. It’s also a moral necessity. Paying millions to big companies and cronies is not necessary. Consultancies have bagged £600million just to advise on building new hospitals. £600 million would provide 1,000 more midwives for at least 6 years. The HSJ also reported this week that “Alan Milburn, the Department of Health and Social Care’s lead non-executive director, is a shareholder in and adviser to Bridgepoint  HSJ. Practice Plus Group is owned by Bridgepoint Group, a FTSE 250 Index private equity company managing assets of €67bn (£55.5bn). In 2019 it set up PPG from the healthcare division of Care UK. Bridgepoint last year sold Care UK, whose main business is residential social care.“

The funding for Maternity is a disgrace nationally. The service spends more on compensation claims than on the whole service nationally. There is also a report to Parliament here. Our babies matter, and they should have excellent services.

The next stage in the current plans for the hospital, from the Integrated Care Board, should be reported to the ICB in March or April. The next meeting of the ICB is in Runcorn: 27 March 2025, 9.00 am to 12.30pm Location: The Events Hall, The Heath Business and Technical Park, Runcorn, WA7 4QX

The public can ask questions in the first half hour of the meeting, and listen to the rest of the meeting. We would have hoped that if the report from the engagement was to be reported, the meeting would have been held in Liverpool.

A major change of service in the NHS should have these stages:

Stage one is Public Engagement, and a report back to the ICB from the public engagement process. Technically, this stage was from October to November, but it seems to be carrying on. Then, the report produced at an estimated cost of £24,000 by a company that did not attend the public meetings nor the ICB board (to our knowledge) goes to the ICB. If the report is accepted more formal plans will be produced and go to formal public consultation.

Save Liverpool Women’s Hospital has produced a formal, detailed, and referenced rebuttal of the Case For Change produced by the ICB. Our rebuttal can be found on this blog, or we can send it on request as either a PDF or paper copy.

We held a public meeting chaired by the local MP Kim Johnson, attended by almost 100 people. We will be posting extracts from that meeting in a different post. We invited the ICB to send a speaker to that meeting, but they declined. Had they attended, they would have spoken to more people than attended all the public engagement’s so-called public meetings combined.

We have distributed many leaflets and held stalls in the street.

Please also see our new post on Myth Busting about the situation with the plans for Liverpool Women’s Hospital.