Author: Mary

Encouraging and collating discussion about workers' struggles and struggles for socialism locally, nationally and internationally

June 4, 2026June 10, 2026

There is more to this “engagement ” than meets the eye!

We are campaigning for the best possible healthcare for Women and babies in Liverpool and beyond.The whole of the NHS has been damaged by under funding and privatization. There has been deep disrespect for the people’s health and especially the health of women and babies.The maternity service nationally is scandalously underfunded, understaffed, and under-resourced. Liverpool Women’s Hospital has been under threat all of this time. Our Campaign has fought hard for the NHS and especially for the Women’s Hospital. More than ninety thousand people have signed our petition, both online and on paper. We are still collecting signatures The 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 very best.

Why is this important? All the maternity and women’s health provision of Liverpool was pulled into this one site. It’s a much-loved hospital. It provides crucial specialised care and the daily joy of new babies. It has a £20 million new neonatal unit and a new diagnostics centre being built. The driving force for closure is a clumsy funding structure, not the needs of women and babies. This is a modern hospital on a good site. and for our mothers, sisters, daughters, wives, lovers, and friends. The alternative wards in the new Royal are not equivalent.

This is a modern hospital on a good site. Our taxes built it for our babies and for our women.

You can see campaigners handing in 20,000 signatures from the petition here.

In June and July 2026, the plans for the future of Liverpool Women’s Hospital are out for a public ‘engagement’ exercise. We believe the information being given to the public is inadequate. The process will feature just Option 2. Although a relatively small change, Option 2 is intended to be the forerunner of moving the whole service to the Royal.We say this is unacceptable. These decisions were as plain as the nose on your face at the Cheshire and Merseyside NHS Integrated care Board meeting in January.( The public can attend) These intentions should be made plain to everyone attending the engagement meetings.

This exercise is part of an intention to, over time, move treatment for women from Crown Street. As we understand it from board papers and attending the ICB, the initial group of women to have treatment under this scheme will be the most complex elective surgical cases in obstetrics and gynecology, who need either immediate access to the highest level of long-term intensive care or joint care from doctors with specialism not included in the Women’s.

Emergency patients are not included and cannot be included. They will still need the specialist doctors. We believe short-term intensive care is available at Liverpool Women’s Hospital. Occasionally, a very ill woman might be best served by ambulance transfer to the Royal or another hospital. The Women’s Hospital reported that they are developing a team for deteriorating patients. We hope this is in place quickly because it is much needed. Meanwhile Option 2 does not address the real issues at Liverpool Women’s Hospital.

How to take part in the Engagement about the future of Liverpool Women’s Hospital

Details of how to take part in this very limited public engagement can be found below, but please read our information on the process too. We believe there are significant omissions in the published case.

If you would like to attend the engagement meetings, they are on.

•Monday 15 June, 2.00pm at Merseyside Fire & Rescue Conference Centre, Bridle Road, Bootle, Sefton, L30 4YD

•Monday 29 June, 11.00am at The Old School House, St John’s Road, Huyton, Knowsley, L36 0UX

• Tuesday 30 June, 5.00pm at Blair Bell Room, Liverpool Women’s Hospital, Crown Street, Toxteth, Liverpool, L8 7SS

This is the registration page link for three public meetings.

Information Sessions – Improving hospital gynaecology and maternity services in Liverpool.

We believe hospitals should work cooperatively, together. The healthcare legislation from Thatcher onward, including the disastrous 2012 Health and Care Act, damaged the natural cooperation between hospitals. Our healthcare has fewer hospital beds per head of population than other advanced countries, fewer doctors per head of population than other countries. To match other countries we would have to hire thousands more doctors. But we have unemployed doctors, The Royal College of General Practice described how qualified G.P.s cannot find posts and the Resident doctors cannot find training posts. This while we need doctors. One in 3 newly qualified midwives cannot find work and other have only part time work. The Independent reported on 4th June 2026 about midwives being told to work double shift with no sleep.

It does not have to be like this. Such madness must stop. Women say No to this nonsense!

Liverpool Royal Hospital, though new and shiny, and with a great staff, has fewer beds than the hospital it replaced. The Royal is overcrowded, as can clearly be seen in the scandalous long trolley waits in A and E, and in the boarding system, not just during the winter.

Liverpool Royal Hospital _{photo credit Wikki Commons}

Some Women’s Hospital services will be dispersed to other places, including some to Aintree. This will mean reduced services Liverpool Women’s Hospital on Crown Street, and considerable extra management requirements to keep track of all the staff and patients in different places.

This will not improve the issues driving the complaints we hear, nor the ones described at the board, which come from lack of staff and resources, failure to heed women and staff raising concerns, and from disrespect for women or medical misogyny, as the government prefer to call it.

The board of Liverpool Women’s Hospital has given its functions to the NHS University Hospitals of Liverpool Group. That is where board decisions are now taken. There was no public consultation on this. It was driven in part by the acute financial problems at Liverpool Women’s Hospital and at the Royal. That board did not mention maternity in its long term plans at the last board meeting. Maternity should be a high priority in any hospital providing that service.

At a recent NHS University Hospitals of Liverpool Board, the figures for building a new hospital for Liverpool Women’s were given as between £350m and £ 500m, and the cost of making the Crown Street site safer was £6 million a year. So it would take 90 years to be cheaper to build.

We believe the information being given to the public in this engagement is inadequate.

This is not just about some small subset of operations happening at Liverpool Royal Hospital. This is a part of a much larger plan to move Liverpool Women’s services into the Royal.The decisions were made at the January Cheshire and Merseyside NHS Integrated Care Board, the ICB.

Option 2 is what is being discussed in the engagement process, and bad though that is, Option 6 is the longer-term plan.

The January ICB meeting made it clear (on video 21 minutes -44 minutes in), “…there is no stepping back from the long-term solving of this issue [meaning Option 6] and the need to press the centre and the region for the resource availability and a big capital spend on this…’ ( Sir David Henshaw, the chair of the ICB. This” big capital spend” will compete with other claims on NHS maternity spending.

The public information can be found here: https://www.gynaeandmaternityliverpool.nhs.uk/archives/

The options

We published our thoughts here after the January 2026 meeting of the ICB agreed its plans for the future of Liverpool Women’s Hospital, plans we think are fundamentally wrong and impractical. There is no room at the Royal. We need better funding for Liverpool Women’s and better systems of cross-hospital cooperation.

There have been improvements at Liverpool Women’s Hospital,as reported at the last Group board meeting

https://www.uhliverpool.nhs.uk/about-us/events/details?occurrenceID=382&returnID=423

There are also a set of problems at Liverpool Women’ reported at the last Group Board meeting.

” Risk: LWH does not offer the full range of clinical support services required for delivery of complex and tertiary maternity and gynecology services.Cause: Lack of access to clinical support services at Crown Street”

These posts include dietetics, stoma care, occupational therapy, respiratory physiotherapy, dietetics, SALT, pain services and psychology.These are posts that could and should be created. it is not clear exactly why they are not provided at the Women’s but they can and should be so provided. The hospital is in deep financial trouble caused by Government under funding and the particular pressures on Cheshire and Merseyside funding. Other issues have been tackled recently. CIP means Cost Improvement Plans:Cuts to you and me. £12.71 million of them while the hospital lacks some services. The world of NHS cuts is utterly unacceptable

The major maternity crisis in England.

We await two huge reports on the state of maternity care in the UK, one from the redoubtable Donna Ockendon, who has spent two years working on a report from Nottingham. And one from Valerie Amos, who is writing a report for the government. Her interim report was damning. Women want respect in maternity care. The mainstream press is finally picking up what social media and our experiences have been telling us for years. Don’t think for a minute that the politicians and the top NHS bureaucrats didn’t know years ago about the damage going on.

Such is the fear of the state of maternity care that many women are very worried, even avoiding hospital care.

Maternity Buildings are in a poor state.We have a very good building on a good site at Liverpool Women’s Hospital, the Royal is new but not without problems, the Cancer centre is quite new, as is Alder Hey. However the situation in some maternity hospitals is scandalous. Years of Austerity have caused huge damage to the buildings in the NHS.

“Against a backdrop of a £13.8 billion maintenance backlog across the entire NHS estate, over half of organisations reported the formal condition of their maternity and neonatal estate as unsatisfactory, with 42% in need a major repair or replacement and 7% running a serious risk of imminent breakdown.” The Maternity and Neonatal Infrastructure Review Findings report 11th September 2025

Liverpool Women’s Hospital has been affected in the Maternity crisis, with some women, including some of our campaigners, furious over the treatment they received. We are not a fan club for Liverpool Women’s Hospital, nor do we speak for them. We speak for the campaign to Save Liverpool Women’s Hospital. We also have huge admiration for the work of the staff at Liverpool Women’s Hospital, who, despite the difficulties, deliver some excellent service.

Staff have held the service together despite the cuts

We understand they often work with one hand tied behind them due to a lack of resources and management tactics. We are happy to have supported health workers’ picket lines and protests, including the March with Midwives in 2022.

Our Campaign wants Liverpool Women’s Hospital to stay on Crown Street, to be much better funded and much better staffed. We call for it to keep all its services together, on one site (with a better bus service to make the site even more accessible). We want it managed to maximise the health of women and babies. We want all the hospitals to work in cooperation as one health service. But we want to keep the focus on women’s health, and of course, the health of all the dearly loved babies. Splitting the services will cause damage to those services and grief and annoying inconvenience for years to come. Imagine some clinics being at Crown Street, some at Aintree, some at the Royal, and some, God knows where. Imagine navigating that with a baby and a toddler.

Far Worse than inconvenience and thereby missed appointments, there is a very real danger of women’s health issues being further minimised and ignored. That is what has been happening in the NHS (and in other countries that have adopted austerity as policy) for the last twenty years, and these problems have been centred in the big, merged hospitals. The reports of major scandals being investigated by Valarie Amos are in the big hospitals. Leeds and Shrewsbury were removed from the list because of other ongoing enquiries. The 14 NHS trusts are:

Barking, Havering and Redbridge University Hospitals NHS Trust
Blackpool Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust
Bradford Teaching Hospitals Foundation NHS Trust
East Kent Hospitals Foundation NHS Trust
Gloucestershire Hospitals Foundation NHS Trust
Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust
Oxford University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust
Sandwell and West Birmingham Hospitals NHS Trust
The Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust
The Queen Elizabeth Hospital, King’s Lynn NHS Foundation Trust
University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust
University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay NHS Foundation Trust
University Hospitals Sussex NHS Foundation Trust
Somerset NHS Foundation Trust

The worst-off women, and those from Black, Asian, Gypsy-Romany and Traveller backgrounds, have been most damaged in this Maternity crisis. Please see our earlier posts.

Liverpool Women’s Hospital is at the heart of Liverpool 8 and much loved there. It seems very bad to be damaging Liverpool Women’s Hospital just as these reports are due to be published. A large public meeting chaired by Kim Johnson MP made the opinions of local people very clear.

Liverpool Women’s Hospital is well-loved.

The women of Liverpool have loved the Liverpool Women’s Hospital since it opened, and they loved the previous women’s spaces like Catherine Street and Mill Road. Far too many women experience domestic and sexual violence and are aware, in brain and instinct, of the need for a safe space, organised by and for women, when they are at their most vulnerable. But it’s not just violence – medical misogyny plays a role too.

This love of the Women’s Hospital has a scientific base. The NHS has truly ignored women’s health.

“Women’s bodies have been treated as medical mysteries, not because they are complex, but because they have been excluded. From research funding to clinical trials, a gender data gap runs deep through modern medicine, shaping who gets believed, who gets diagnosed, and who gets left behind.

Less than 2.5% of medical research funding goes to women’s reproductive health – despite women and girls making up more than half the world’s population 1 .

This imbalance is not an accident; it reflects a pattern of medical misogyny, a system that undervalues, underfunds, and misunderstands women’s health.

The consequences are devastating. Women are being dismissed, misdiagnosed, or left in pain for years before receiving answers. Many turn to online communities for help after being told by doctors that their symptoms are “normal”, that they are “making a fuss about nothing”. For people with endometriosis, the average diagnosis time is nearly nine years. Nine years of pain, endless appointments, and disbelief.”

It’s vitally important to keep a women’s space. Not just a physical space, but a place of science and care devoted to women and their babies. A space with a well-qualified and well-treated workforce focusing on women’s health, where women are heeded as women and not dismissed. There is a quiet but fierce rage behind the demands for a woman’s place in healthcare.

No one can deny that the fashion for huge hospitals has at least coincided with real drops in the quality of maternity care and long waiting lists for Gynaecology. These mergers started in the 1990s with the policy of making hospitals work like competing businesses, and then a second wave in 2010 with the Foundation Trust era, as smaller hospitals were pushed into mergers by a financing model that favoured the big hospitals This at least coincided with the deterioration of Women’s health care. Women’s health has indeed deteriorated.

Parliament’s Women’s Equality Committee ( these are MPs, not the government) has twice described the situation for women in great detail but has not been able to secure the necessary funding to improve matters. The first WEC report stated that ‘Medical misogyny’ is leaving women in unnecessary pain and undiagnosed for years”.

We also recognise the importance of the physical environment, and Liverpool Women’s is one of the best hospitals in that respect.

Austerity and political misogyny have a lot to do with the neglect of, and damage to, women’s health. The NHS has been underfunded and consequently understaffed for the years of Austerity, and the future is looking grim too. In 2025-6 and 2026-7, the cuts imposed in Cheshire and Merseyside NHS and through them to the Hospitals and out-of-hospital care are awful. For more details, see this.

Hospitals are under huge financial and political pressure. See Liverpool Women’s Hospital in the Eye, The NHS Storms, written earlier this year.

Women’s health and healthcare in the NHS

Women in England have a life expectancy of about 83 years, but their Healthy Life Expectancy (HLE) is roughly 61.9 years. This means women live upwards of 20 years in ill health.

This is worse in areas where people are struggling with the cost of living, and worse for women with high caring responsibilities, like much of Liverpool, especially where the cost of living is hitting hardest.

And;

“One key point is how females and males differ in many biological and social factors that fluctuate and, sometimes, accumulate over time, resulting in them experiencing health and disease differently at each stage of life and across world regions. The challenge now is to design, implement and evaluate sex- and gender-informed ways of preventing and treating the major causes of morbidity and premature mortality from an early age and across diverse populations.”

The NHS has not done such a good job in the big general hospitals in achieving that understanding, nor in establishing good practice, so there remains a good case for a women’s hospital.

“What happens in pregnancy and early childhood impacts on physical and emotional health all the way through to adulthood the UK dropped from 20th to 26th place (out of 38) in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) on female life expectancy between 2000 and 2022. This compares with a drop from 14th to 19th place for male life expectancy during the same period healthy life expectancy among women fell by 2.5 years between 2019 to 2021 and 2022 to 2024”.

Heart and Cancer, too, have neglected women.

It’s not just in the exclusively female aspects of medicine that we see neglect of women. It is true in heart and cancer, too.

There is much written and studied about women and heart disease.

“Recent data published by Professor Chris Gale from the University of Leeds, funded by the British Heart Foundation, found that more than 8,200 women in England and Wales could have survived their heart attacks had they simply been given the same quality of treatment as men, according to their paper in the journal Heart. The researchers found that women in the UK had more than double the rate of death in the 30 days following their heart attack than men. The researchers suggest that this may be, in part, explained by women being less likely to receive guideline-recommended care.”

Some heart/cardiovascular diseases are exclusive to women and linked to their reproductive health. The improvements must come from all sectors of the NHS.

Women have different heart attack symptoms from men, and it helps if we know these symptoms. It helps if the NHS remembers them too!

Cancer

Several years of National Cancer Patient Experience Survey data shows that women are less likely to be treated with dignity and respect and less able to discuss their worries when receiving hospital care than men – an indictment of NHS culture. The NHS’s inability to listen, itsreluctance to give patients meaningfulpower and choice, and its tendency to disempower patients despite them being the real experts in their own health conditions, is ‘by design’.

They also say, “That is to say, it is a feature of a care model that is:

• one size fits all

• too focused on provider interests, rather than patient interests

• highly paternalistic, centralised and bureaucratic”

The NHS gets a pasting in these reports, but we think something big is missing from the reports.

NHS staff have faced obstacles in getting the resources they need to treat people as they should be treated . Years of cuts, privatisation, and meddling with NHS structure have caused huge damage, and the staff carry no blame for that. Rather, they have worked against the odds to maintain the service.

Lord Darzi, who produced a report about the NHS immediately after the General Election, said, “The Health and Social Care Act of 2012 was a calamity without international precedent. It proved disastrous.” We think the Health and Social Care Act 2022 was another disaster, and Wes Streeting’s sweeping attacks on NHSE and the ICBs have caused another wave of disruption.

We support the original NHS model. This was a universal healthcare service, free at the point of need and paid for by the government. It was a national service with all parts cooperating, but with strong local involvement. Investing in health care makes the economy stronger, not weaker, and helps the population’s health and happiness. Even the right-wing World Bank says so. The wave of privatisation and for-profit companies being involved in the NHS has been an utter failure for patients and staff.

It is a crying shame that Labour politicians, including the not lamented Health Secretary Streeting, have taken money from those who make big profits from healthcare.

The situation in Liverpool is especially serious. In the document Health in Liverpool 2040, it was made clear that the health of women in Liverpool is declining.

“In Liverpool, women can expect to live 57.9 years in good health, and men up to 58.3 years-this means on average women will spend 28% of their lives in poor health, whilst men will spend 23% poorly.

For women, healthy life expectancy is lower than at the turn of the decade, and the gap with England has widened from 5.5 years to 6 years, while for men, the gap continues to be 4.8 years.

“The infant mortality rate has long been regarded as a key indicator of population health that is sensitive to the prevailing socioeconomic circumstances affecting children. In Liverpool, around 26 infants every year do not reach their first birthday.”

“What happens in pregnancy and early childhood impacts on physical and emotional health all the way through to adulthood”

All of this supports a focus on women’s and children’s health, needs currently not being met nationally or locally. This in not to the detriment of men, but because women have different needs

“As we go marching, marching, we battle too for men, for they are women’s children and we mother them again.”

Women also experience sexual and domestic violence, poverty through low wages and inadequate childcare. It takes two incomes to raise a family. Hospitals can only contribute about one-third of what is needed for good health for women. Good affordable food, good housing, clean air, low stress, well-paid jobs, confidence in the future, freedom from assault all help our health outside hospital. But when we as women come into the hospital, it is because we need help. That help must be skilled, respectful, compassionate and well funded.

Too Many Hospitals in Liverpool ?

The NHS seems to believe that there are too many hospitals in Liverpool; they have done for years. The history of this was covered in a Post article called “https://www.livpost.co.uk/a-fucking-feudal-baron-the-long-legacy-of-liverpools-most-feared-nhs-boss/ The article says that a fan of Mrs Thatcher running the local NHS in the 1980s pushed through all the hospitals in Liverpool becoming Foundation Trusts. Liverpool has a different pattern of hospital care from many other cities, and the government wants to change that. It is pushing the ICBs and Hospitals to make drastic cuts.

In 2014, there was a Panorama programme saying that Liverpool has too many hospitals. The next day, it was announced in the Echo that Liverpool Women’s was the hospital that would close.

We started our petition, at first online and then on paper, and we have fought for many years to keep the hospital open.

The process of merging the hospital is underway.

The board-level management of Liverpool Women’s Hospital has been handed, without public consultation, to the University Hospitals of Liverpool Group. However, the Chief Executive of that group has resigned. This coincided with plans to take all Liverpool Hospitals into that group being knocked back nationally. The public now has much less chance to monitor what goes on in Liverpool Women’s Hospital. Board papers cover all the hospitals, There have been major changes in the senior staff. There is no one on the board with a record of work in maternity, nor in Gynecology. The recent long-term plan, discussed in the May meeting of the hospital group, did not even mention maternity or women’s health.

We all have good reasons to be concerned.

April 1, 2026April 1, 2026

Demand an end to Corridor Care.

Corridor care causes great harm, and it could be solved if the government chose to do so. Our NHS is underfunded and is being served up to private profit on a plate. Our NHS has too few doctors, too few beds, too little equipment, and not enough physical space.

The NHS model of healthcare, free at the point of need, for everyone and provided as a national public service, is the most cost-effective and safest model. Our underfunded services are inadequate, and this costs thousands of lives. No amount of superhuman effort from staff can change this. The answer is investment in the publicly owned and delivered NHS.

The Royal College of Emergency Medicine commented in March, 2025, England’s data also showed:

28 ambulances were diverted away from major EDs in the week ending March 1st. This typically happens when departments are overwhelmed, and there are concerns about the time it would take to hand off a patient

There were 1,058 fewer beds available in type-1 NHS trusts than in the same week last year

Delayed discharges fell on the previous week, but only by 42, to a daily average of 13,778 “

Since the Cheshire and Merseyside ICB was established in 2022, we have submitted questions to the Cheshire and Merseyside NHS Integrated Care Board meetings regarding the ongoing winter crisis and corridor care. When we talk about the Winter Crises, we mean:

Long waits in A&E,

Treatment being delivered in corridors without privacy, dignity and full equipment,

Long waits on trolleys to be admitted once a decision has been made to admit a patient,

“Boarding”, where patients are admitted to an inappropriate ward or to an already fully occupied ward

“The Royal College of Emergency Medicine estimates that there were more than 16,600 deaths associated with long A&E waits before admission in England last year. (2024)”

All this is happening while many of our local hospitals have had a freeze on vacancies for more than a year, unfilled shifts, overworked staff and reduced staff headcounts. It is also happening while the ICB proposes moving Liverpool Women’s Hospital into floor 9 of the chronically overcrowded Liverpool Royal Hospital (See page 16 of the ICB’s January 2026 papers).

These are our questions and their answers from the March ICB 2026. The questions were written after reading the ICB board papers.

Question 1 Re page 16:

This is the third year of winter crisis corridor care reported by the ICB in Cheshire and Merseyside. Such “care” is hated by patients, their families, and the staff caring for them. It is known to increase mortality and to lack dignity, however kind, caring and competent staff might be.

From the ICB papers for March 2026, “The Committee reviewed the position on winter pressures and noted significant concern regarding acute bed occupancy, which had reached 96%, exceeding the recommended threshold.”

Question 2

When will it return to the safe level of 85%?

From the ICB papers for March 2026, “The Committee reviewed detailed information on corridor care and noted that the number of instances had reduced over the Christmas period despite an overall increase in A&E attendance“

Answer from the ICB

“This is reflective of a wider national situation. Acute Trusts in England have not routinely operated at 85% occupancy for many years, and currently for England occupancy is typically in the region of 95%. Locally, we have determined that if trusts were able to operate at around 92% occupancy this would facilitate improved flow and patient experience, and this is the level we aim to achieve in our winter plans, especially in the run up to Christmas in order to mitigate against the impact of the increased demand we typically see in January.“

Comment: This means our hospitals are being operated at an unsafe occupancy level. We need more beds and more staff.

Q3. Was this because the hospitals had cleared beds before Christmas due to fewer elective surgeries and fewer planned treatments other than emergencies?

Answer: In part yes, there are typically fewer elective procedures over the Christmas period. However, a broad range of actions were taken within our winter plans, all of which aimed to contribute to a safer winter.

Comment: So the level of care in other services is reduced because of the underfunding and understaffing of the “winter crises”

Q3. Did these figures for bed occupancy include those patients who were in the corridor or other unusual settings? Or were these patients not counted?

Answer “No however corridor care is captured in other data reporting“

Comment: So the overall figure for hospital occupancy was even higher.

Q4. What percentage of patients treated in Corridors were 70 years old and more?

Answer. “The ICB does not hold this information.”

Comment. Please see this report from Help the Aged, showing the horrid experiences of older people in corridor care and waiting for an issue. This backs up the experience of patients reported to our campaigns. Again, this is unacceptable.

Q5. How many children were there?

Answer: The ICB does not hold this information.

Q6. Given this high occupancy, were extra cleaners employed? Does the ICB require higher hygiene measures? No answer

Q7. How many hospital-acquired infections were there amongst this cohort of patients? No answer

Q8. How many falls were there in this group of patients? No answer

There were no direct answers from the ICB to these questions, but these comments were included in the response from the ICB

“Whilst corridor care should never be seen as acceptable or normalised, as a C&M system, extensive work has been undertaken to develop quality standards called the “Red lines Toolkit, (that have since been nationally adopted) to ensure we maintain safety and give the best experience as possible when patients are nursed in those environments. Assurances on these quality standards are sought via the NHS standard contract and are reported via QPC on a quarterly basis. All Trusts are embedding and developing these standards, with Healthwatch also using the toolkit as a prompt for their visits. HCAI and falls rates specific to these areas are difficult to monitor, however clinical teams are continuously addressing the recognised IPC risks through the use of a range of IPC measures across the emergency departments”

The problem with this approach is that it tries (or pretends to try) to make a fundamentally unsafe procedure appear safe. We, the public, the people who own and pay for the NHS, gain nothing by joining in this game. The ICB cannot pretend this is safe. They can try to make it a bit less unsafe. The Royal Colleges, the most senior representatives of doctors and nurses, are telling us it is very unsafe. Our own experiences tell us it is unsafe. NHS employees can be bullied into saying eggs are oranges, but the public doesn’t have to believe it. We should be insisting that our elected representatives act urgently on this matter. NHS workers and NHS campaigners protested outside Parliament about corridor care in February 2026.

The Royal College of Emergency Medicine, the professional body for the doctors working in emergency medicine, wrote on March 5th 2026

“The crisis in English Emergency Departments is fixable, if government and health service leaders are willing to act on bed capacity in our hospitals. That’s the key takeaway from the latest Urgent and Emergency Care’ situation report’ from NHS England, published today, covering the week ending March 1st.

The figures showed why Emergency Departments (EDs) continue to be full to bursting, with virtually no capacity in wards to admit patients. In that week, the average bed occupancy was at 94.2% – higher than the previous week, and around the same as the same week last winter. At such high occupancy, wards essentially have no beds left, as there are always some which are closed due to infectious diseases, or being turned over.

Driving this, the figures showed, was a daily average across England of 13,778 patients who occupied beds despite being medically fit to leave – known as delayed discharges. Meanwhile, sustained pressure remains from seasonal illnesses like Norovirus and Flu. Patients with these diseases occupied an average of more than 1,500 beds per day. ‘

A ‘safe’ bed occupancy level is thought to be 85%, and a total of 10,855 additional available beds would be needed to get there.

This lack of beds has a severe knock-on effect in A&E, where the sickest patients are waiting to be admitted.

March 18, 2026March 25, 2026

Utterly Unacceptable; Cheshire and Merseyside NHS Cuts 2026-7

All NHS services in Cheshire and Merseyside, including Liverpool Women’s Hospital, are affected by cuts made in 2025-2026 by the Integrated Care Board. The financial situation this year, 2026-27, is set to be worse unless the people have a say and persuade the politicians that this is a very bad decision. MPs need to hear from the public on this issue. You can write to them. They work for you.

You can also raise the matter with your union, with your community groups, with families. People need to know, so we can win the case for much better funding and an end to creeping privatisation. This government has u turned before when they realise how unpopular their decisions are.

The major issues of the Maternity Crisis are directly affected by this financial squeeze, as evidenced by the problems described as “capacity pressures” in Baroness Amos’s interim report. We continue to campaign on this.

We wrote in detail about the Cheshire and Merseyside 2025-2026 budget in a post last year. Sadly, our fears were realised.

We are working with other campaigns and unions fighting for the NHS. Please get involved if you can. This is the press statement that NHS campaigns across Cheshire and Merseyside have issued ahead of the Cheshire and Merseyside ICB meeting on 26 03 2026, where the cuts will be discussed in detail. We will update this post or make another post reporting on what happens at this meeting.

Press Statement

From NHS campaigns in Cheshire and Merseyside, including Keep our NHS Public Merseyside, Defend our NHS, Save Liverpool Women’s Hospital, and other groups.

Cheshire and Merseyside 26 03 2026

Campaigners protest the utterly unacceptable funding for the Cheshire and Merseyside NHS.

“Utterly unacceptable: Cheshire and Merseyside NHS is expected to make further service cuts in the 2026-7 budget year. This follows the grave situation in 2025-26. We urge MPs to protect our area and address these proposals, and call on the ICB to consult the public. We call on the public to rally behind our NHS.

Cheshire and Merseyside NHS ICB meets on Thursday 26 March 2026 at The Conference Suite, Riverside Innovation Centre, 1 Castle Drive, Chester, CH1 1SL.

In 2025-26, deep cuts led to corridor care, long wait times, the use of inappropriate wards, and longer delays in planned treatment—impacting even children and Maternity units—and the ICB papers point to another winter crisis next year. Hospitals had to rely on” distressed funding “to pay their routine bills. Cutbacks affected staff recruitment / filling vacancies, with freezes compounding the effect of staff shortages and a target of 15% headcount reductions. This even included cutting cleaning staff, while hospital-acquired infections are at problematic levels. Qualified staff are unable to find work. Reduced rates paid to staff for covering extra shifts means leaving many shifts uncovered. Patients and staff suffered.

Stretching staff ratios has a significant effect on patient outcomes. This was made clear in the Covid enquiry into the NHS, published this week. Decisions on staffing levels are political, and there is widespread concern about these developments.

Several Cheshire and Merseyside hospitals face mandates to cut costs, including the Countess of Chester, the Liverpool Hospital Group, and Wirral University Teaching Hospitals.

This is not a reallocation of funding to out-of-hospital care, which continues to face difficulties. There have been significant redundancies within the ICB while additional duties have been placed on the NHS. The ICB also paid PricewaterhouseCoopers £5 million for efficiency advice while reducing staff who might otherwise have performed similar work.

The focus of the Cheshire and Merseyside NHS Integrated Care Board on Thursday, 26 03 2026, is on reducing spending, as seen in its single improvement plan (page 148). Cheshire and Merseyside NHS is expected to manage further funding reductions. This year’s real-terms budget increase is 0.5%, even as poverty, inadequate housing, food insecurity, and low wages rise, and as an ageing population requires more medical support.

We value our NHS and are grateful for the skill, dedication, kindness, and humour of our NHS workers. Investment in healthcare grows the economy, and these deep cuts threaten the service we depend on and the wider economy, locally and nationally.

Reference articles

https://www.hsj.co.uk/quality-and-performance/mapped-rtt-waiting-times/7041284.article

https://www.bma.org.uk/bma-media-centre/penny-pinching-nhs-trusts-put-cheshire-and-merseyside-patients-at-risk

https://www.cheshireandmerseyside.nhs.uk/get-involved/upcoming-meetings-and-events/nhs-cheshire-and-merseyside-integrated-ca See page 148.

https://lowdownnhs.info/analysis/scoping-the-cuts-nhs-systems-finance-and-staffing-in-the-north-west/#:~:text=In%20Analy

Liverpool Women’s Hospital

Liverpool Women’s Hospital is directly affected by these issues because it is underfunded, and only changes to the national Maternity Tariff will address that. The Maternity tariff is, according to NHS England, “a structured payment system used by commissioners to pay healthcare providers for Maternity services, usually via a ‘Maternity pathway payment’. In the warning letter about not meeting financial targets sent to Liverpool Women’s Hospital, theysaid “3.2 The PricewaterhouseCoopers FY25/26 Rapid Financial Diagnostic carried out across the Cheshire and Merseyside Integrated Care System in June 2025, highlighted the following issues and financial risks at the Licensee: 3.2.1 the National Maternity Tariff does not meet the full cost of Maternity services at the Licensee which include increased patient complexity and acuity which is driving changes in the case mix (for example, growth in deliveries by caesarean section in recent years) and interventions.” so NHSE themselves say the hospital does not get enough money but must continue to make cuts.

The NHS is an essential and much-loved service, but it has been badly damaged. The staff work wonders, actual wonders in many situations, but the workload is becoming unbearable. At the Covid Enquiry, the Chief Medical Officer said, “Running the NHS at almost full capacity in peacetime is a Political choice” Bed occupancy is as high as before Covid. For more information on bed occupancy, this is a good read. That is a political choice and a bad one.

Poor housing, low wages, expensive food, air pollution, and expensive heating all contribute to poor health, but that is no excuse to underfund healthcare, while we have a system that could provide that care. Good healthcare helps grow the economy. Denying children swift access to quality healthcare creates problems for the rest of their lives. How expensive is that?

The ICB receives funding from the National Health Service England and shares it between hospitals and other providers. This money is simply not enough to provide all the required services. Five out of seven local hospital trusts are being warned of “overspending “and not producing sufficient “Cost Improvement Plans”.These trusts include Liverpool University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, Liverpool Women’s Foundation Trust, Mid Cheshire Hospitals Foundation Trust, Countess of Chester Hospital Foundation Trust, and Wirral University Teaching Hospital FT. Cheshire and Merseyside ICB had the worst “overspend” in the country – but we need this funding for patient care.

Liverpool University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, with the highest “overspend”, serves the most deprived catchment area of any NHS trust in the country.

There were cruel cuts at the ICB level last year to fertility services, celiac services, and even funding for reducing waiting lists for children. At the same time, £5 million was allocated to pay for financial advice from PricewaterhouseCoopers. Each hospital was expected to make more cuts.

This “overspend” is affected by Government decisions to (nationally) “equalise” spending across areas, but this does not account for differing levels of need. The Nuffield Trust commented in 2025

“Regionally, the deepest deficits are in the North West (2.2% of revenues) and the Midlands (1.5% of revenues), which, along with the North East and Yorkshire, have also seen the steepest declines in financial health since 2022/23.

Acute hospital trusts serving the most deprived patients experienced the steepest declines in their finances in the year to 2023-24, while those serving the smallest proportions of deprived patients experienced modest improvements.

This extreme form of accounting is similar to the US Accountable Care system, but the Accountable Care system is based on a private profit model. The NHS is supposed to be a universal public service.

We want value for money and healthcare driven by human need, not human greed.

We do not need the more than £1.8 billion wasted on privatisation and financial consultants, nor do we need the one-billion-dollar pharmaceuticals deal with Trump.

““In a letter to the House of Commons Science Innovation and Technology Committee on 30 January,1 Vallance said the deal—which includes a commitment for the UK to double its spend on branded pharmaceuticals from 0.3% of GDP to 0.6% of GDP by 20352—would cost the NHS an extra £1bn by 2028-29 over the remaining three years of the current spending review.3“

Meanwhile, the situation for patients and staff gets tougher. Vacancies go unfilled, and shifts are not covered. Staff are carrying the burden of the cuts. Patient treatment inevitably suffers from hospitals working above safe bed occupation levels and the increased risk of hospital-acquired infections.

The British Medical Association have issued a statement on 12 03 2026 saying that the cuts are “putting patients at risk”

“Doctors say that NHS England has imposed financial restrictions on Integrated Care Boards (ICB) – the NHS organisations which plan and manage healthcare services in a region – and NHS trusts that are damaging patient care and resulting in unreasonable consequences for staff. As a result of these funding restrictions, the ICB in Cheshire and Mersey have introduced recruitment freezes, plans to reduce staffing levels despite significant workload demands, has imposed limits/bans on agency workers, and has unilaterally reduced overtime rates.

In a BMA survey in the region, 88% of respondents said they believe that funding cuts are seriously harming the delivery of safe patient services. 92% of respondents to the survey support formally entering a trade dispute should the matter not be resolved, and 80% of respondents support industrial action should it be deemed necessary.

Doctors are saying they are “overwhelmed” and that morale amongst staff is at an all-time low, with many left to cover unmanageable patient numbers with staffing cover that does not meet required safe levels.

The NHS has fewer hospital beds and staff than other wealthy European countries, which often have far lower levels of poverty. Poverty makes people more likely to get ill, to have multiple pr health issues and to die younger.

Our elders are suffering badly when they go to the hospital via the Accident and Emergency system.

“Shocking new analysis by Age UK in 2024/25 shows there were more than 100,000 instances of over-65s waiting between one day (24hrs) and three days (72hrs) in A&E after a decision to admit them had been made. In more than half (54,000) of these cases, these older people were aged 80 plus.Data reveals “exponential increase in the last 6 years – in 2018/19, people aged 65 plus experienced a wait of between one and three days in A&E only 1,346 times.”

Our area is one of the worst hit by poverty, especially amongst children. In some Liverpool wards, two out of three children live in poverty.

“The child death rate for children resident in the most deprived neighbourhoods of England was more than twice that of children resident in the least deprived neighbourhoods.“

Staff are working as hard as ever, yet the problems remain unresolved. More than 3 million people are waiting for treatment. The winter crisis will (according to Wes Streeting) continue next year or even until the general election. Long waiting lists will continue, although some patients have been removed from the list. Well-qualified staff are unable to get employment. The poorest areas get the worst GP funding, but GPs are unemployed or working outside of medicine. The new GP funding structure is not popular with GPs.

The budget for 2026-27 will be even worse. This article from the Health Service Journal spells out how our area will be one of the worst hit.

No to Palantir

Palantir is a secretive US spy-tech company tied to Donald Trump, with a terrible track record worldwide. It runs the NHS “federated data platform”. We can’t trust them with our health data, and we can’t trust them to respect the values of our NHS. The BMA warns that the Palantir partnership “threatens to undermine public trust in NHS data systems” and highlighted a “lack of transparency in how the data will be stored and processed”. https://notopalantir.goodlawproject.org/

We say.

Restore the NHS

as a publicly-owned, publicly-delivered public service. Privatisation is expensive and damaging to patient care and to the cooperative working of the healthcare system. Restore the funding that used to be directed at areas of poverty. Restore the public service funding model. Remove the “market” model. Restore staff working conditions.

NHS staff have increased workloads, unfilled vacancies, and pathetic pay rises, with pay still not matching the 2014 level in real terms.

Repair the NHS.

Where buildings and equipment are in a poor state, they should be repaired. Repair services where the quality of care has deteriorated. Bring all mental health back into the NHS. Make the NHS once again a good place to work and get care.

Rebuild the NHS.

Where services have been cut, they should be reinstated. Mental health dentistry and Maternity are badly hit.

Maternity Crisis: The government can and must invest in NHS finance and staffing for the Maternity service, locally and nationally. Save Liverpool Women’s Hospital. Ormskirk Maternity is also now facing closure. Join the fight for Maternity, women’s health and the whole NHS

This requires investment. We remind politicians that health care expenditure that reaches patients, staff and resources is an investment that gives great returns. We will not suffer in silence

What you can do

• Talk about it with friends,

• Raise the matter at work and in your union branches.

• Put leaflets through doors. Put posters up in shops.

• Set up local community meetings.

• Write to or email your MPs and councillors. Find addresses on “They work for you” on the internet

February 12, 2026February 14, 2026

Stop the Cuts. Fund our hospitals.

This week, the Health Service Journal reported that Liverpool Women’s Hospital and Liverpool University Hospitals Trust (The Royal, Aintree, and Broadgreen) have all been issued warnings about their licences.

The NHS describes a hospital’s licence as “The NHS provider ( A provider in this situation is a hospital, our edit) licence forms part of the oversight arrangements for the NHS. It sets out conditions that providers of NHS-funded healthcare services in England must meet to help ensure that the health sector works for the benefit of patients, now and in the future.

All NHS foundation trusts and NHS trusts are required to hold a licence. NHS controlled providers and independent providers of NHS services are required to hold a licence unless exempt.

Save Liverpool Women’s Hospital campaigners first saw mention of a threat to the Hospital’s Licence in the Hospital group papers at its January 2026 board meeting. These papers are available to the public on their website. The papers are lengthy and technical. We wrote to the hospital board to ask what it meant. This is our question.

“Question re page 31 “NHSE notified LWH of draft enforcement undertakings concerning breaches of licence conditions for financial sustainability/governance and performance.”

What should the public understand this to mean? We have read the documents that are easily available on this matter, but we cannot find answers.

What are the risks to the Hospital’s finances? What are the risks to patient care? What are the risks to jobs?

We received this reply:

“Thank you for your enquiry and apologies for the delay in issuing a response.

NHS England (NHSE) has shared draft enforcement undertakings with Liverpool Women’s NHS Foundation Trust. This is a formal process used when NHSE believes a Trust needs to strengthen its financial planning, governance, or operational performance. It is designed to support improvement and ensure the Trust is on track, not to signal that services are unsafe.

The draft undertakings referenced at the Board of Directors meeting indicate that the Trust faces financial and performance challenges and needs to improve in areas such as waiting times and financial sustainability. ( our emphasis) The challenges and the work being undertaken to mitigate the associated risks have been set out within the Integrated Performance Report and Hospital Management Board assurance reports which form part of the Trust’s reporting arrangements. These are available to members of the public via the Trust’s website. NHSE and the Trust are currently agreeing the final details which are expected to be finalised in early February 2026.

No immediate risk to the Trust’s financial stability has been identified. The undertakings simply ensure that the Trust has a clear, credible plan to improve its financial position which is reported through the Board of Directors along with the associated risks to delivery. There is no suggestion that care is unsafe. The purpose of the undertakings is to improve performance for patients—for example, by improving 18 week elective and Faster Diagnosis Standard (FDS) performance together with the 62 day Cancer Standard. The Trust remains regulated by the Care Quality Commission, which would intervene if there were any concerns about safety.

The undertakings specifically do not refer to job reductions but focus is on better planning, governance and performance.

Finally, the undertakings require the Trust to report progress on a regular basis to NHSE and arrangements are in place for this to take place. This progress will be reported through the Board of Directors.”

Then on the 10th February, The Health Service Journal posted an article about the outcome of these licence issues with this headline: “Liverpool University Hospitals FT and Liverpool Women’s Foundation Trust told to improve finances“

In March of last year, 2025, the Health Service Journal reported that Liverpool Women’s Hospital and Liverpool University Hospitals Trust (The Royal, Aintree, and Broadgreen) had been issued warnings about their licences.

The letter to Liverpool Women’s Hospital is also about improving waiting times for Gynaecology treatment. Our campaign strongly agrees that Liverpool Women’s Hospital and all hospitals need to improve gynaecology treatment waiting times. In March of last year, Dr Ranee Thakar, President of the RCOG, said, “As a gynaecologist, my clinic lists continue to grow, and the women and people I see are experiencing worsening conditions and more severe symptoms. There are still over 580,000 women and people in England waiting to see a gynaecologist, and this number isn’t falling quickly enough.” To improve waiting times, they need staff and funding, not more cuts.

Liverpool Women’s Hospital has long waiting lists for gynaecology. It is not advertising for more gynaecology doctors on its website. The reality is that there is not enough money to clear this backlog. It’s only women after all!

The whole Integrated Care Board for Cheshire and Merseyside is expected to make huge cuts (CIPS) this year. The ICB funds hospitals and primary care, so cuts to them are reflected in large reductions in funding for both. The ICB itself was issued a similar order in November, similar to the one sent to Liverpool Women’s and Liverpool University Hospitals Trust. It can be found here.

https://www.england.nhs.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/20251124-Cheshire-and-Merseyside-ICB-Undertakings-November-2025.pdf

The section below is quoted from Louise Shepherd’s letter to Liverpool Women’s Hospital, from NHSE North West. See Section 3.2.1 for utter nonsense. It says that the NHS does not give Liverpool Women’s Hospital enough money to run Maternity services, and then the rest of the letter tells it to make cuts!

Financial Sustainability and Governance

3.1 In particular:

3.1.1 The Licensee reported a £28.4m deficit (excluding deficit support funding

(DSF)) for the financial year (FY) 24/25, which was in line with plan.

3.1.2 the Licensee had a Cost Improvement Programme (CIP) Plan of £5.9m in

FY24/25 with a 77.2% recurrency target. Whilst the Licensee delivered

£5.9m CIP in FY24/25, only 40.9% of schemes were delivered recurrently. (“recurrently” means that they will make the same savings next year on a service they cut this year)

3.1.3 the exit underlying position of the Licensee at 31st March 2025 was reportedas a £34.3m deficit.

3.2 The PricewaterhouseCoopers FY25/26 Rapid Financial Diagnostic carried out across the Cheshire and Merseyside Integrated Care System in June 2025, highlighted the following issues and financial risks at the Licensee:

3.2.1 the National Maternity Tariff does not meet the full cost of maternity services at the Licensee which include increased patient complexity and acuity which is driving changes in the case mix (for example, growth in deliveries by caesarean section in recent years) and interventions. Our Emphasis

3.2.2 continued reliance on non-recurrent savings, and the risk-adjusted natureof the CIP portfolio.

3.2.3 system stretch risk remains significant, with limited scope for further system-wide support. (This means other hospitals can’t help.)

The letter to Liverpool Women’s Hospital is available below. We will post the full letter at the end of this post as requested, but this link may be a more efficient way to access it if you are reading on a phone or tablet.

Click to access 2026-01-30-lwh-final-enforcement-undertakings-signed.pdf

So LUFT, the ICB, and Liverpool Women’s Hospitals. Mid Cheshire Foundation Trusts and the Countess of Chester all have these licence warning letters.

Liverpool University Hospital Trust has yet another obligation imposed on them. They were already in a similar position to the one now imposed on LWH. The most recent LUFT letter can be seen here

https://www.england.nhs.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/app-c-section-111-notice-of-imposition-luhft.pdf. Again, it is to do with delivering services without adequate funding. It is imposing further cuts. It is addressed to the Hospital with the highest level of deprivation in the country. Our Hospitals, our people cannot take this.

Campaigners attending ICB meetings as members of the public have seen disgraceful cuts to many services being implemented by the ICB, including those to Fertility Services and to coeliac patients’ access to gluten-free products, and even worse, children’s waiting lists. Meanwhile, £5 million has been paid to Price Waterhouse Coopers for consultancy services on implementing these policies. The enforcement letter to the ICB is available here.

https://www.england.nhs.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/20251124-Cheshire-and-Merseyside-ICB-Undertakings-November-2025.pdf

Liverpool Women’s Hospital has long waiting lists for gynaecology, yet it is not advertising for more gynaecology doctors on its website. The reality is that there is not enough money to clear this backlog. Doctors are looking for posts. The problem is solvable. But it’s only women after all.

Campaigners attending ICB meetings, as members of the public, have seen disgraceful cuts to many services being implemented by the ICB, including those to Fertility Services and to coeliac patients’ access to gluten-free products, and children’s waiting lists. Meanwhile, £5 million has been paid to Price Waterhouse Coopers for consultancy services on implementing these policies.

The full letter to Liverpool Women’s Hospital is available at the end of this post, as requested, but this link may be a more efficient way to access it, especially if you are reading on the phone.

Click to access 2026-01-30-lwh-final-enforcement-undertakings-signed.pdf

The letter from NHSE England to Liverpool Women’s Hospital

Note that the sender, Louise Shepherd, previously ran Alder Hey Hospital, so she knows Liverpool Women’s Hospital and the other Liverpool Hospitals.

2026-01-30-lwh-final-enforcement-undertakings-signed Download

We object to any NHS organisation wasting money, especially on privatisation, outsourcing, or insourcing, or on millions spent on financial consultants and PR firms. The issue is that the NHS lacks the funding it needs to provide crucial services.

Please remember to sign our petition, or, if you have already signed, ask friends to sign as well. If you can help our campaign to save Liverpool Women’s Hospital, please get in touch.

January 29, 2026June 4, 2026

Liverpool Women’s Hospital in the Eye of the NHS Storm

January 2026; updated April 2026

“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”. We repeat this as the NHS governing body in Cheshire and Merseyside presents “new” proposals for Liverpool Women’s Hospital. We have more than 80,000 people supporting our position through our petitions, online and on paper. The paper petition represents tens of thousands of face-to-face discussions with the public.

Our options for Liverpool Women’s Hospital

Liverpool Women’s Hospital is in the eye of two storms: the NHS as a whole and the National Maternity Crisis. We refer to corridor care, recurring winter crises, long waiting lists, too few doctors and too few beds, and significant waste from privatisation and a competitive rather than cooperative structure between hospitals. We also refer to the Maternity crisis, where yet another enquiry is underway and where the outcomes for women have gone back 20 years.

We demand that the Government and our local MPs restore, repair, and rebuild the NHS.

The board of Liverpool Women’s Hospital has some say in these discussions but the Integrated care board of Cheshire and Merseyside Integrated Care Board (ICB) will make the final decisions

Amid these storms, options for Liverpool Women’s Hospital’s future were discussed at the ICB on 29th January 2026. They include options that have been presented before and met with huge opposition, as demonstrated by the popularity of our petition and demonstrations. There is no national background given on the NHS’s huge financial problems due to underfunding, nor on the national Maternity crisis. The ICB papers can be found here.

We sent the questions below to the Cheshire and Merseyside NHS Integrated Care Board meeting on the 26th March

Question to the ICB 26th March

Q1. On p.61 the board papers state that ‘the cost of delivering the current model (of maternal & neonatal/women’s services in Liverpool) contributes to the lack of system financial sustainability’

Is not the inadequate maternity tariff and underfunding of maternity and neonatal care as recognised in the initial Amos report and the NHSE NW licence letter one of the main drivers of the financial situation of Liverpool Women’s Hospital?

Q2. How will moving services to the Royal cost less as the biggest cost is staffing?

Q3. What is the timeline for the publication of the Women’s Services Business Case and the consultation?

These were the answers

Answer

The item on page 61 is outlining the strategic position and configuration of maternity services across all of Cheshire and Merseyside not just in Liverpool. The financial position of Maternity and neonatal services in Liverpool is complex with maternity tariff being just one of a number of contributory factors.

The full costing of major service reconfiguration of maternity and gynaecology services in Liverpool has not yet been finalised. Staffing costs are a significant area of spend for all NHS services however there are a range of other factors that also need to be taken into consideration.

Subject to the development of the draft business case, and the Board of NHS Cheshire and Merseyside approving the engagement plan, we hope to begin public engagement on proposed improvements to hospital gynaecology and maternity services in early June 2026. This will run for six weeks.

The engagement feedback will be used to inform the final business case for this proposal, which will then be presented to the Board of NHS Cheshire and Merseyside for decision-making. We currently expect this to take place in autumn 2026.

Our comments on these answers

1.”outlining the strategic position and configuration of maternity services across all of Cheshire and Merseyside not just in Liverpool.” We know that there are issues about the future of Ormskirk maternity and concerns about the situation in some other maternity units but these were not the central issues discussed in the item on page 61. NHS North West certainly considered the maternity tariff to be a factor in the licence letter about financial issues at Liverpool Women’s Hospital.

3″,Subject to the development of the draft business case, and the Board of NHS Cheshire and Merseyside approving the engagement plan, we hope to begin public engagement on proposed improvements to hospital gynaecology and maternity services in early June 2026. This will run for six weeks”. This is useful to know.

Our campaign demands candour about the financial pressure that led to the ICB proposals. We demand candour about the financial pressures that have led to so many Maternity units closing or being merged into worse facilities, including acute hospitals, further from the women they serve.

Option 6 in the ICB papers proposes moving some services to smaller rooms in the Royal, rather than keeping the Maternity Gynaecology, the NICU, and other services at the Crown Street site. “This would involve compromises and standard room sizes“, including for neonatal services. This is unacceptable, especially as Liverpool Women’s have been celebrating how good the new NICU (Neonatal Intensive Care Unit) at Crown Street is. As one staff member from the Royal said with heated emphasis, “There is no room for the Royal in the Royal”.

We do not oppose certain complex operations taking place at Liverpool Royal Hospital. Such cooperation should have happened years ago.

We presented a detailed, referenced document to the ICB on the future of Liverpool Women’s Hospital, but it does not appear to have been used. Our offers to meet with the working party have not been accepted, and the significant opposition has not been addressed in their published documents.

We are concerned about some of the wording in these proposals. For example, in the Equalities Impact Assessment (page 2, para 5), it states that, across all options, the future model “is expected to include increased clinical presence across acute sites.”

That phrase ‘expected‘ is worrying, as it seems to offer no guarantee that clinical support will be increased or even maintained, whatever the configuration. Yet poor Maternity staffing acuity has been at the heart of Ockenden’s findings, the Amos interim review, and RCM’s recent criticisms of understaffing.

Also, on the consultation timelines being proposed before proceeding to a business case. Six weeks is being recommended. Given the report earlier concedes that the options, including the preferred option, will mean considerable changes to patient care, are complex in nature and have aroused widespread public and political interest, the consultation period proposed looks far too short and a longer period say 12 weeks might allow for example the various local councils scrutiny committees and public health to review (and also allow more interrogation of the options)

*^{It’s important to remember who is at the heart of this discussion}*

The ICB has a huge financial problem. Although on a smaller scale, Liverpool Women’s Hospital also faces major financial problems because it relies on the Maternity Tariff, which is nationally inadequate. Moving the hospital would not tackle this problem.

Two main options were presented at the meeting for the future of Liverpool Women’s Hospital: a short-term and a long-term plan. They are both based on the idea of moving Liverpool Women’s Hospital long-term into the Royal. The short-term option, option 2, involves most services remaining at LiverpoolWomen’s Hospital, but about 30 high-risk surgical deliveries are planned at the Royal, and about 75 gynaecological operations are also scheduled there. Many of these ideas are good, but not with Liverpool Women’s losing management of them and not as a step towards putting all the services into the Liverpool Royal.

This is the commentary from the board papers on option 2

Option 2 – Key Service Details

6-bedded enhanced care unit, with improved facilities and accommodation, on the LWH site – cohorting 4 existing beds (2 Maternity, 2 gynaecology) and 2 additional beds to accommodate future demand. ( our response: “Good if the finances are made available)

Appropriate accommodation and capacity (beds/theatres / critical care) provided at the RLH site foradditional gynaecologyy operations and high-risk births. This would include additional neonatal support for births (staff, kit, transport). Our response. Why can this additional capacity not be provided at Liverpool Women’s Hospital, where mothers and babies can be together and where the whole expert NICU staff are based?

Greater investment in obstetric physician time (from 1 day to 5 days p.w.)( our response: “Good”-if the finances are made available)

Investment in visiting AHPs and therapist staff not currently provided for at LWH (e.g. OT, nutrition, SALT).( our response: “Good if the finances are made available)

Investment in adult acute medical time to manage the required input to LWH (e.g. colorectal, urology, cardiology). ( our response: “Good if the finances are made available)

Consultants of the day (one for gynaecology and one for Maternity) and increased consultants on call (gynaecology, Maternity and neonatology) to enable cover at non-LWH sites (including attending EDs / completing ward rounds). ( our response: “Good if the finances are made available)

Increase outreach midwifery to 24/7 – for visiting non-LWH sites( our response: “Good, but only if the additional finances and additional staffing are made available).

New role for outreach specialist gynaecology – for non-LWH sites – in particular for older women post op. Our response is that this needs more explanation. We do not want to see older women getting a second-class service.

Dedicated ambulance resource for inter-site transfers. (Our response: We have suggested this in the past.)

The second set of options (called option 6) involves moving most of the Women’s services to the Royal. Or, and they say this is very unlikely, building a new building at the Royal. They are not consulting on these options. They are consulting on option 2 as a stopgap. However, they said at the meeting, there would be”No stepping back from the long-term support for option 6 “( moving into the Royal)

Worse physical conditions!

The plans on Page 36 of the Cheshire and Merseyside ICB paper, dated 29th January 2026, make it clear that the physical environment will be worse than the national standard and certainly worse than at the existing Crown Street site.

“The test-to-fit exercise for option 6a confirms that all major functional elements can be accommodated within the RLH estates envelope with some compromises.

Existing derogations within the RLH would need to be accepted, e.g. there would be some compromises on standard room sizes (all single rooms are approximately 4sq.m. under sized) and there is no isolation provision on a typical ward.

For neonatal services:

• A typical IC / HD cot space allowance is sized at 20 .q.m. The test to fit exercise indicates a range of around 12q.m. to 15sq.m.

• A typical special care cot space is around 11.5sq.m with a test to fit range of 8sq.m. to 11sq.m.

The existing size and shape of the Royal Liverpool Hospital building would mean some services may need to be configured differently and/or require different staffing models e.g. maternity wards.

Structural and MEP (Mechanical, Electrical and Public Health) constraints – e.g. birthing pools, theatre ventilation and drainage on Level 9 would require further investigation in subsequent design stages.

Detailed design work would be required with clinical teams in order to test this option further.

Liverpool Women’s Hospital is not more dangerous than other Maternity services, far from it. Behind each option is an implicit implication that Liverpool Women’s Hospital is somehow dangerous. In another item in the ICB reports, the Local Maternity System reported that Cheshire and Merseyside Maternity had better outcomes than two neighbouring ICBs. Liverpool Women’s Hospital is the largest Maternity provider in Cheshire and Merseyside, so the “dangers” appear to be limited.

Liverpool Women’s Hospital does need improvement, as does most of the NHS, after years of cuts. However, last year the Care Quality Commission, which inspects all hospitals, rated Liverpool Women’s Hospital “Good” across all five criteria: Safe, Effective, Caring, Responsive, and Well-led. This is at a time when the Care Quality Commission reported that” Under our assessment framework introduced in 2024, we have published the findings of inspections for fifteen maternity services. Of these, two-thirds of services (66.7%) have been rated as inadequate or require improvement, with a third (33.3%) rated as good. No services have been rated as outstanding.

Fourteen hospital trusts are being investigated for Maternity safety failings. Liverpool Women’s Hospital is not one of them. MBRRACE organises national surveillance and investigates the deaths of all women and babies who die during pregnancy in the UK, so each woman’s death is investigated nationally. We can find no mention of dangers from a separate site.

NHS Hospitals should work together as a system. The 2012 Act was described by Lord Darzi as “a calamity without international precedent” and a “disastrous” piece of legislation. The 2012 and the 2022 legislation sought to treat hospitals as separate competing companies. It was a disaster. We support inter-hospital cooperation.

Transfers between Hospitals are routine. Too few women become extremely ill at Liverpool Women’s to justify a level 3 intensive care unit, so very occasionally an extremely sick woman needs to be transferred. This is not a pleasant experience. However, no evidence was presented at the ICB meeting that more women die at Liverpool Women’s Hospital than at other Maternity hospitals, nor that they die because of being moved to the Royal, one mile away. One good suggestion was to establish a dedicated Ambulance service for transfers. Other hospitals in the Liverpool Group are much farther apart, yet they transfer patients between them. There is no suggestion that those hospitals should be moved.

Please help us to continue the fight to save Liverpool Women’s Hospital, to repair the national Maternity service and to fight to Repair, Restore and Rebuild the NHS. Please help us.

Our alternative to the Options presented by the ICB.

Keep Maternity, Gynaecology, the NICU, Genetics and Research, all the existing services, at Liverpool Women’s Hospital, at the Crown Street site. The experience of placing Maternity services in large acute hospitals has not been good. There is little evidence to support the practice, and much to disprove it, as shown in the current Maternity crisis and investigations into Maternity failures. Preserve Liverpool Women’s Hospital as a women’s service, for all our mothers, sisters, daughters, friends and lovers and every baby.
Improve birth outcomes and experiences for women and babies.
Improve post-natal care for all women.
Improve the national funding structure for Maternity.
Improve cooperation and joint working with other hospitals and other NHS providers.
Improve funding to allow many more midwives.
Increase funding to allow for more medical staff to care for deteriorating patients.
Employ more Gynaecology staff to address the long waiting lists, recognising this is a national and local issue. Stop outsourcing to cosmetic surgery hospitals.
Provide free parking for staff.
Provide a dedicated ambulance service between Liverpool hospitals to take pressure off the emergency service, so badly hit in the (entirely avoidable) winter crisis.
End outsourcing to private health companies.

The press statement we sent out.

“At their meeting this Thursday, the ICB Board approved a report outlining several options for Liverpool Women’s Hospital, all of which will move services away from the hospital at the Crown St site.

The ICB favoured option is 2, which sets up some ‘high risk’ Maternity and gynaecological provision in the Royal.

Campaigners asked the ICB formal questions submitted before the meeting. Against earlier practice, they declined to let questioners speak.

Why has there been so much waiting and suffering in A and E, so much corridor care, so many long trolley waits for admission to the wards, all of which costs lives, pain and indignity at the Royal, if there is spare capacity in the hospital available for Maternity, neonatal, and gynaecology on Level 9?

Why is there no mention of the opposition to these plans from the community, trade unions, and campaign groups? We refer to this comment from the ICB’s own papers, 24 07 25.

Why are the financial (both capital and revenue problems) of LWH based on the issues with the Maternity Tariff, not mentioned in these options? How will any of this help the hospital’s financial problems? Will these options not increase the administrative load? Why are there no costings, and why is there no mention of the likelihood of gaining significant capital spending for these options? In earlier papers from the ICB and the hospital board, the additional cost of maintaining the dedicated services on Crown Street was estimated at approximately £ 6 million per year. The cost of a rebuild was defined as “up to £336 m-£549m”. We pointed out that it would take up to 91 years for rebuilding to be cheaper than providing safe care at Crown Street.

Why is this paper not set in the context of the national Maternity crises, when hospitals with some of the configurations described here have had terrible outcomes for babies and mothers? Professor Marian Knight, Director of the National Perinatal Epidemiology Unit and MBRRACE-UK maternal reporting lead, said: ‘These data show that the UK maternal death rate has returned to levels that we have not seen for the past 20 years.” Clearly, the Maternity service has not benefited from moving Maternity into general and acute hospitals.

Why is there no mention of midwife staffing, nationally one of the major causes of stress, but not specific to LWH on Crown St (see risk five below)? Liverpool Women’s can fill its permitted vacancies, but its midwifery staffing level is inadequate.

Risks are asserted without proper evidence; the SLWH campaign produced a detailed response to these assertions (see here)

Why was the Save Liverpool Hospital Campaign excluded from this round of consultations, especially after previous assurances that we would be involved?

We demand:

Full public funding for LWH on its Crown St Site

Urgent investment in Maternity care to improve staffing, facilities and tackle inequality to make Maternity safer.

Much improved staffing and funding for Gynaecology

A publicly owned, publicly provided NHS, fully restored, repaired, and rebuilt.“

The ICB claim;

“Risk 5 – Women receiving care from women’s hospital services, their families, and the staff delivering care, may be more at risk of psychological harm due to the current configuration of services” Stress levels are no different to the national average.

RCN press release April 2024 states that “24.5% of nursing staff are off work with stress, anxiety and depression. It is so widespread that it accounts for 1 week of absence per year for every practising nurse.” Therefore, LWH is in line with the national average. NHS sickness data shows the average nurse took an entire week off sick last year due to stress-related illness

Please support our campaign. Sign our petition. Write to your MP and your councillors.

Donate to our campaign.

A more detailed analysis of the situation after this ICB meeting will follow as soon as we have had time to discuss it.

We need the ICB to come clean with the public and the Government and state clearly that the problems of the NHS are a result of chronic underfunding, creeping privatisation and outsourcing, which is sucking the lifeblood out of the NHS to no benefit to us, the patients, nor to the staff, nor to the economy, nor to our mothers and babies.

December 4, 2025February 1, 2026

Liverpool Women’s Hospital Update

*_{The Mother Statue at Liverpool Women’s Hospital}*

Update 08 01 2026

We are now expecting the report on the future of Liverpool Women’s Hospital to appear at the ICB meeting on 29th January 2026. However, other problems may intervene. The winter crisis, staff leaving at the ICB, and the likelihood of major redundancies at the ICB may get in the way. The ICB cannot and should not balance its books. It is in deep financial trouble due to cruel government cuts. The cuts the ICB is expected to make this financial year are brutal. We can see the damage to hospitals across the region. Liverpool Women’s Hospital cannot function long-term without a change in funding that allows for additional staffing and equipment. The two problems, funding for the ICB and funding for the Women’s Hospital, are interlinked.

Investment in healthcare grows the economy. It promotes health wealth and happiness. But that money must get to the staff, patients, buildings, and equipment, not to privatisers providing often substandard care.

Then we have the growing anger from bereaved parents, from women injured in childbirth, from overworked midwives and from the resident doctors. Patients are disgusted by year-long trolley and corridor care in Accident and Emergency, even before the winter crisis. We need more doctors,midwives, nurses and more hospital beds.

Campaigners will be attending the public section of the ICB meeting in January and will report back

What follows is an article from early December 2025.

What’s happening now, in December 2025, with the plans for Liverpool Women’s Hospital?

What is happening at Liverpool Women’s Hospital is part of a great set of problems in the NHS. Battered and damaged as the NHS is, it is still very necessary and much worth saving, for all our mothers, daughters, sisters, friends and lovers and every baby. “As we go marching, marching, we battle too for men, for they are women’s children, and we mother them again“

We stand with NHS workers and thank them for keeping the service going despite the appalling policies from this and recent governments.

Investing in healthcare gives great returns to any country in terms of health and wealth. We ask every reader to help us fight to repair, restore, and rebuild the NHS and Liverpool Women’s Hospital.

Grow our petition! It’s got 84,000+ signatures online and on paper. More will help – it gives the campaign a louder voice with the decision makers. No more Maternity cuts! We need more midwives! Fund Maternity and Gynaecology well across the nation.

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

We campaign in Cheshire and Merseyside, and many other campaigns are working in different areas. The voices for the NHS and Maternity are growing louder and louder. Please amplify these voices.

Latest news

The ICB (Integrated Care Board ) is the governing body of the NHS in each area. Ours is the Cheshire and Merseyside ICB.

Waiting outside the ICB meeting

At the ICB meeting on November 27th, 2025, which campaigners attended (as members of the public), we were told that the item was not to be discussed, neither publicly nor privately. We had sent written questions. They replied:

“Unfortunately, due to a number of other urgent items which require immediate discussion, the Women’s Hospital Services in Liverpool item will now not be
included on the agenda for this month’s private Board meeting, and will instead be rescheduled.“

“When it takes place, the private Board discussion will be focussed on how we move forward with the programme, taking into account the extensive options
work that took place over the summer, and will not involve making final decisions about how services might look in the future.”

We had asked in a written question whether the ICB would be discussing the costs for relocation versus staying at Crown Street, as seen in the hospital papers. The additional cost of keeping the dedicated services on Crown Street was described as approximately £6million extra per year. The cost of a rebuild was defined as“up to £336 m- £ 549m“. We pointed out that it would take up to 91 years for rebuilding to be cheaper than providing safe care at Crown Street.

This campaign would like to know what was involved in “the extensive options work that took place over the summer.” We would like to know who was involved in these options and where they were reported, because we cannot find them reported in either the ICB or the hospital board meetings. Why the need for secrecy? Why not involve concerned members of the public? We wrote and asked to be involved in these discussions and were refused. The NHS is not a private corporation; much as some rich companies would like to acquire it, it is still a public body founded by the people, paid for by the people and staffed by the people.

The ICB also said they would still discuss it in private when the item returned to the agenda. We were told there would be some news in the new year. We have also been promised meetings with the ICB chair and the Hospital Group CEO, so we might find out more.

The future of Liverpool Women’s Hospital remains uncertain. What is certain is that Maternity, nationally and locally, must be better funded. It is summed up in a simple fact that we need more midwives.

There is a reluctance in the NHS to say that underfunding and understaffing, too few midwives, and too few hospital beds are core problems. Well, we will say it for them.

Since the 2016 discussion about the future of Liverpool Women’s Hospital, there have been suggestions that it would be rebuilt near the new Royal. Many people still believe this. We neither believe that it will be rebuilt nor support rebuilding it. The Crown Street site is a good building. The staff are a good team with a global reputation. The women and babies of Liverpool need and love that hospital.

Many other Maternity services nationally operate in appalling buildings. The Health Service Journal reported that” Many Maternity and newborn units are at ‘serious risk of imminent breakdown’, regularly hit by leaks and floods, and too cramped to provide the necessary care, an official NHS England report admits. There was a detailed report published by the NHS about this last year. The poor buildings should be rebuilt, not Liverpool Women’s Hospital. Many other hospitals urgently need a rebuild, but the plans for that are delayed.

Improvements at Liverpool Women’s Hospital

There were reports last year that a deteriorating patient’s team was being developed at Liverpool Women’s Hospital, and we hope that this is now in place. This is much needed. Other improvements are in place, including bringing the “soft facilities management services” (cleaners, porters, etc.) back in-house. The Case for Change states that “As part of elective recovery funding, £5m has been provided to establish the Liverpool Women’s Hospital site as a centre for gynaecology procedures. This includes four state-of-the-art procedure rooms developed to free up capacity in theatres and create additional clinic space for more minor operations, and will enable up to 4,200 additional gynaecology procedures every year. In addition, Crown Street now hosts a community diagnostics centre with CT (computed tomography) and MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) from 8am to 8pm, and urgent access to CT 24/7, which has delivered improved access to scans and reduced transfers for these diagnostic tests.

_{From an exhibition at the celebration of 30years at Crown Street, (Our Photograph)}

The CQC report in August 2025 stated that Liverpool Women’s Hospital has improved.

“Karen Knapton, CQC deputy director of operations in the north west, said: “We were pleased to see that leaders and staff working in Maternity services at Liverpool Women’s Hospital had acted on our feedback from the previous inspection and worked hard to make improvements. Women and people using this service now had a much safer and improved experience of their care and treatment. Behind this was an improvement in how well-led the service was, which in turn supported staff to provide better care.

“For example, it was positive to hear that leaders had improved staffing levels. Women using the service told us there were enough staff to meet their needs, and they were treated with compassion and kindness. It was great to see this reflected in a recent people experience survey, which found 94% of women felt they were treated with respect and dignity.

“Overall, the Maternity team at Liverpool Women’s Hospital should be proud of the improvements our inspection found. They should use them as a foundation to keep building on.”

We applaud these improvements. Nowhere does the CQC mention relocation, nor have earlier, less complimentary CQC reports mentioned this.

Underfunding and understaffing have caused severe damage to mothers, babies and staff. More has been paid in damages from the service than has been spent on the whole national Maternity service.

Scandalously, “the potential cost of Maternity negligence claims in England since 2019 has reached £27.4 billion, which significantly exceeds the estimated £18 billion budget allocated to Maternity care over the same period“. We say improve the services and reduce the damage! When will the government focus on the needs of mothers and babies?? The voices of women and their families must be even louder on these issues.

Co-location has not been a success for maternity. It is not the only problem, far from it. Cuts and underfunding have been a disaster.

The “Case for Change” also says, “All other specialist centres for gynaecology and Maternity services in England have co-located acute and emergency hospital services.” We say that this co-location of Maternity in general hospitals has not proved to be a cure-all for Maternity crises, far from it. Maternity, despite being based in acute and general hospitals, is in crisis.

Although a standalone site, Liverpool is not one of the 14 Maternity providers involved in the so-called “rapid” national investigation of Maternity and newborn baby care across England. The Labour Government promised a rapid enquiry, but this enquiry is now not reporting before Christmas and might report sometime in the new year, and will not hear from bereaved parents.

Fourteen general hospitals ARE included in the national Maternity crisis, and others have been the site of some of the Maternity scandals. The Shropshire Okendon enquiry indicated that the management did not give Maternity due attention, nor did the Morecombe Bay hospital management give Maternity due attention, even after the big report.

It’s not just Maternity that is suffering in the NHS.

The women’s hospital reflects the many problems besetting our healthcare system. Books have been, and will be, written about this. We are trying to change the situation. These are the core issues.

For many years now, the NHS has been underfunded and understaffed compared to other countries, and this has been a clear government policy.
The organisation of the NHS has been damaged by pro-market legislation, especially the 2012 and 2022 Acts, which set hospitals up to compete against each other and allow for-profit interests to have a much greater say. Lord Darzi, in his report for the incoming Labour Government, described the 2012 Act as a“calamity without international precedent” that “proved disastrous”. For Liverpool Women’s Hospital, it meant that cooperation between hospitals proved very difficult, and the high cost of the foundation trust system was too much to bear. Not keeping to an impossible budget made them constantly under pressure.
Maternity and gynaecology, across the country, suffered badly, with one in six Maternity units closing, and standards deteriorating. A major Maternity crisis developed with standards and staffing suffering, resulting in damage to mothers and babies.

What were the greater issues that pushed the Liverpool Women’s Hospital to the back of the agenda? They were hugely based on funding, cuts and the winter crisis. We will write about them in another article soon.

“You get one chance to deliver a baby safely. There are no reruns or repeats. The accoucher must get it right every time. To do so, the midwife must be supported by her colleagues, midwifery management and work within a fully safe environment. Alas, with the fragmentation of our NHS, top-down draconian management, our mothers, their babies and our midwives are given short shift, and they become the victims of often tragic circumstances. There is a woeful shortage of skilled midwives. Anyone can deliver a baby, but it takes a skilled midwife to do so day in day out safely and with professional accountability,” from our campaigner Stephanie (below)

Campaigner Stephanie, one of the generation of midwives who say they worked in the golden age of the NHS. We fight for another golden age. Join us

November 4, 2025November 16, 2025

Improve Black Maternal Health, drive racism out of maternity care. November 2025

Black Maternal Health and Anti-racism Action in the NHS: Issues for Liverpool and beyond.

We honour the women in Liverpool who have suffered or died because their treatment was affected by conscious or unconscious racism. The best way to honour these sisters is to campaign ever more strongly against both inadequate Maternity care, nationally and locally, and against the insidious rise in racism in this country. Anti-racism education in the NHS can save lives.

There has been excellent work done in the community about Black Maternal Health, not least the recent exhibition at Kuumba Imani Millennium Centre. Thanks to Creative Encounters for the work shown here. Photos by Teresa Williamson. There is more on this at the end of this post.

This week, a memorial, “a quiet reflective remembrance space to recognise the lives of women lost in care at the hospital”, is being opened in Liverpool Women’s Hospital. We are therefore devoting a post to this issue.

Our campaign to Save Liverpool Women’s Hospital received this message from the Hospital.

” When we last met, we discussed the development of a quiet reflective remembrance space to recognise the lives of women lost in care at the Hospital. We are delighted that this has now been completed, and we are planning to open the garden on Thursday, 6 November at 1.30 pm. There is a wider event planned with some reflective presentation from 12.30, with refreshments also in the Blair Bell, it would be lovely to see you and your other colleagues at the event.“

Outcomes in Maternity have worsened nationally, and there has been no improvement for Black and Asian women, as all services have suffered.

“Black women in England face disproportionately poor outcomes in Maternity care, shaped by systemic failings in leadership, training, data collection and accountability, according to a new report from the Health and Social Care Committee, Black Maternal Health. The inquiry heard repeatedly that racism is ‘one of the core drivers’ of poor maternal outcomes for Black women, as MPs heard from clinical experts and women about cases where racist assumptions had directly harmed Black women’s care. Black women are 2.3 times more likely to die in pregnancy, childbirth, or the postnatal period than White women, according to recent figures.

The report (from Parliament) “acknowledges that failings in care for Black women are taking place in the context of a Maternity system that is failing women more broadly, with the NHS in England having paid £27.4 billion in Maternity negligence since 2019, estimated at a figure greater than the total Maternity budget for the same period. “

The most hard-up women also suffer significantly; the women using Liverpool Women’s Hospital come from some of the most deprived areas in the UK.”Women from deprived areas of the UK are more likely than those in less deprived areas to die during or shortly after pregnancy, and this disparity has increased in recent years.“

This country has disrespected birth and women’s health to such an extent that we have lost twenty years of progress. Women have had enough. Join the fightback.

Charging migrant women for Maternity care at 150% of the NHS costs is cruel, harmful, and does not recoup the costs of the system.

Asylum-seeking women can be moved around the country on the whim of the Home Office, disrupting antenatal care and costing the lives of babies and mothers.

MBBRACE-UK 2019 report “that women born outside the UK represent nearly a quarter of maternal deaths. Refugee and asylum-seeking women, despite contributing 0.29% of the population, make up 6% of this group.”

Women as a whole have seen worsening conditions.

Professor Marian Knight, Director of the National Perinatal Epidemiology Unit and MBRRACE-UK maternal reporting lead, said: “ data show that the UK maternal death rate has returned to levels that we have not seen for the past 20 years.”

Maternal deaths are not common, but still too high. Over the last century, the death rate has fallen dramatically, especially since the NHS was introduced. It is because of years of campaigning by staff and the public that maternal deaths have been reduced, but we need to do much better. The UK still has four times the maternal death rate of Norway and Denmark.

“Overall, 284 women died in 2021-23 during pregnancy or within 42 days of the end of pregnancy in the UK. The deaths of 27 women were classified as coincidental. Thus in this triennium 257 women died from direct and indirect causes, classified using ICD-MM (World Health Organisation 2012), among 2,004,184 maternities, a maternal death rate of 12.82 per 100,000 maternities (95% CI 11.30-14.49).”

In 2021, we campaigned about how babies born to Black mothers were twice as likely to suffer a stillbirth. The situation for Black mothers came into awful focus in 2024 with a terrible death at Liverpool Women’s Hospital. We wrote;

“We join with others in demanding action to make it safer for all mothers to give birth and demand action to reduce the particular risk to Black, Asian, and poor women of all races. In the UK, the rates of baby death and stillbirth among Black and Asian mothers are double those for white women. We have written about the higher number of deaths among Black babies.”

In one of these maternal deaths, investigators from the national body, Maternity and Newborn Safety Investigations (MSNI), were called in after the woman died. They reported that “The investigation into her death found hospital staff had not taken some observations because the patient was ‘being difficult'( our emphasis), according to comments in her medical notes.”…ethnicity and health inequalities impacted the care provided to the patient, suggesting that an unconscious cultural bias delayed the timing of diagnosis and response to her clinical deterioration.

Another black woman died shortly after, and we have not seen the final report, which will have been covered in the MBRRACE report this year. Such reports are confidential and focus on system issues, not on individual hospital issues.

“Each death is reviewed by assessors in four main areas: pathology, obstetrics, midwifery and anaesthetics. Where appropriate, care is also examined by speciality assessors such as psychiatrists, general practitioners and emergency medicine specialists. All reviews have a primary assessor from each speciality and, if specific issues are identified, a second assessor may also review the woman’s care.

Hospitals report each death to the Maternity and Newborn Safety Investigations programme, which reports to the families and hospitals.

Between January 2014 and November 2023, 17 maternal deaths were recorded for patients who received care at Liverpool Women’s Hospital. We do not know the ethnic breakdown. There will have been about 70,000 births in that time, with a mortality rate of about 0.02 per cent. So deaths are quite rare.

Our campaigners were able to comment at the board meeting when the first death was announced, because the public could, at that time, attend the full board meetings of Liverpool Women’s Hospital. We knew in advance because we had read the board papers. We could then make this situation well-known. Public attendance is no longer allowed. Many times, in the early years, our campaigner, Teresa Williamson, was the only Black person in the room at these meetings, and she was not always treated with respect.

In a recent webinar about migrant women giving birth, Liverpool was highly praised for the support midwives gave to one of the speakers, who gave her experience of giving birth in total poverty. This contrasted with other women’s experiences in different parts of the country. The specialist teams at Liverpool Women’s Hospital, supporting vulnerable women in the community, do great work.

The Hospital has run a comprehensive anti-racism in service training for all staff since these deaths, together with the Anthony Walker Foundation. There is a detailed newspaper report here.

Anti-racism action, though, is like housework. It must be done again, and again, and again- even more so because there has been a rise of public racism in the politics of both the UK and the USA. This is against the decades-long trend of racism receding. Crazy ideas that Black women suffer less pain than white women are still commonly believed. One study (in the USA) found that 50% of healthcare professionals believed this. This is why anti-racism must be included in professional education.

Together with Refugee Women Connect, we met with senior members of the board of Liverpool Women’s Hospital to express our concerns. We asked for a memorial in the gardens and a pamphlet that could be reproduced in each woman’s language with illustrations, each page being available to the midwife in English to aid communication and discussion when a full translator was not available.

The memorial garden is being opened for all women who have died, and we were told that an online version of the multi-language information is being developed.

Giving birth far from home is hard for every woman. Children suffer when their mum dies. Many of the women who die in childbirth, or in the year after giving birth, would not have died had the Maternity service been appropriately staffed.

The blame for the state of Maternity lies squarely with the politicians. They have made the decisions on funding and staffing. They brought in austerity. Midwives are overworked. Obstetricians are overworked, as are other linked professionals and the ancillary staff. They are too overworked to give the quality of healthcare women need. This harms midwives and mothers. Staff need time to think, reflect, and discuss. We will continue to demand fundamental improvements in funding, staffing, and NHS management.

Maternity staff carry huge responsibilities and deliver an excellent service when they can, but no one can be perfect when there are too few staff and poor organisation. Neither can they be expected to fight for improvements alone. The public must take a major part.

The management systems of the NHS (especially since 2012, and then 2022, with the appalling Health and Care Acts that treated the NHS as a business, not a public service) have made staff feel they cannot raise concerns or that those concerns will be ignored. This has been reflected in many of the Maternity enquiries, including the Kirkup enquiry into the Maternity tragedies in Morecombe Bay.

This country can and must afford a good Maternity service; we currently rank 17th out of 19 wealthy countries for the safety of our Maternity services. In the first twenty years of this century, everywhere but the UK and the USA improved their Maternity care. We need more midwives. We need more midwives.

Please keep fighting for all our mothers, sisters, daughters, friends, lovers, and every precious baby.

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November 1, 2025March 18, 2026

Winter is coming! – an entirely avoidable winter crisis in the NHS .

Winter comes relentlessly every single year. Yet somehow, UK governments in the last decade have failed to prepare. What is the point of government if not to protect our lives?

A clarion call to action. We appeal to the readers to take action on this; it is pointless to report the details of the horror stories of avoidable baby and maternal deaths, long waits for treatment, and corridor care, without saying how it can be changed. That change requires thousands of us to take action, like the Poll tax campaign, like the suffragettes, like the Hillsborough campaign. It is within this government’s power to make fundamental change, but our voices have to be louder than those of the big US corporations advising this government and funding the politicians.

Last winter’s NHS crisis never fully ended, and corridor care and long waits in A&E continued into July and August. Current figures for waits and corridor care are wor se than during the pandemic! This winter, 2025-2026, looks bad already. This is unnecessary and entirely avoidable. In countries with more severe weather pressures, they do not experience the same problems. Norway does not have a winter crisis on this lethal scale. The human race would not have survived if we had not learned to prepare for winter. This chaos is policy -entirely unacceptable policy. It is based on the dogma that government spending on health should be reduced. This policy is nonsense and benefits those whose giant corporations want to replace the NHS with the hated American system.

“Investing in health reduhttps://www.ageuk.org.uk/latest-press/articles/shocking-new-corridor-care-analysis-reveals-exponential-increase-in-people-aged-65-experiencing-a-wait-of-between-one-and-three-days-in-ae/#:~:text=Sadly%2C%20Age%20UK%20has%20already,(53%25%20or%2053%2C870).ces A&E use and long-term sickness, and both are associated with an increase in the employment rate. When it comes to quantifying the return on investment, our analysis reveals that every pound invested in the NHS results in around £4 back to the economy through increased productivity and workforce participation.“

Investing in healthcare makes the country healthier, wealthier, and happier. This was made crystal clear when the NHS was founded in the aftermath of World War II.

“In 1948, founded on three core principles, the NHS was the first universal health system to be available to everyone, free at the point of delivery and based on clinical need, not ability [to pay].“

Our NHS staff are skilled, work hard, and perform daily miracles of care – saving lives, reducing pain, and providing kind, well-researched care -but they too suffer from the intolerable conditions in our hospitals.

The blame lies squarely with governments, and this government must change course, drop the many-headed hydra of privatisation and return the NHS to its fully public service model. The USA can teach us nothing about healthcare for all. The US system is more expensive for both ordinary people and the government. Many are left without care, and key indicators like life expectancy and infant mortality are worse than in the UK. So why do we have advisers from the big US health corporations deep in the NHS and government?

“The U.S. has the lowest life expectancy at birth, the highest death rates for avoidable or treatable conditions, the highest maternal and infant mortality, and among the highest suicide rates [of high-income countries].”

The following are US Health Corporations that are working for profit within the NHS: UnitedHealth Group/Optum, Operose Health (owned by Centene Corporation – now divested), Acadia Healthcare, Palantir Technologies, Johnson & Johnson, Medtronic, Abbott, Pfizer, Baxter Healthcare, Fresenius, DaVita, IBM, Oracle, Apple, Alphabet, and Amazon.

The winter crises reflect the general underfunding, understaffing, and disorganisation of the NHS by this and previous governments. Lord Darzi described the Health and Social Care Act 2012 as a “calamity without international precedent” and “disastrous”. But those policies continue and are extended. That it is simply unacceptable.

We let the government close hospitals, reduce the number of hospital beds as the population aged. Perhaps we believed the government knew better? We can see now that they did not know better, but that their cronies in the big health corporations wanted to exploit our NHS. We need as many people as humanly possible to understand what is happening and to build a campaign bigger than the Poll Tax.

There are two huge assets in the NHS that the corporations want to get hold of. One is the NHS’s market power as the world’s largest single purchaser of medicines and medical equipment. As such, the NHS could bargain to get the best possible prices. Then other countries would bargain with the NHS as the baseline. They would have to pay more than the NHS but not ridiculously so. Starmer is likely to agree to pay 25% more for drugs to appease Trump and his trade wars. Yet, according to Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the NHS will not get more funding. Tax Research website says “it is a transfer of wealth from the UK public purse to the shareholders of multinational corporations. ” Medicines account for about 10% of NHS spending, so a 25% rise in costs will be significant.

The second major asset of the NHS that the American corporations want is our data. Seventy-seven years’ worth of the health records of tens of millions of people in the UK, with all the different treatments and outcomes they have received – this is worth billions to drugs, insurance companies and the AI industries. Many of us refused to allow our data to be used, but the government is not only ploughing ahead, but it is also giving our data to Palantir, which will harvest still more data from future treatments.

“Palantir is a US tech company that works with the Israeli Defence Force, British and American militaries, the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) and, since 2020, the NHS.” You can sign a petition about this here.

Last year’s winter crisis ran through the year.

In October 2025, the Royal College of Emergency Medicine and the Royal College of Physicians both reported that corridor care has continued through the year; “Put simply, the situation is shameful. Patients are being failed. It’s time to act.”

All the other NHS problems contribute to the winter crisis and, if not tackled, will make each year worse.

Meanwhile, more than six million people are waiting for elective treatment, and more than half a million women are waiting for gynaecology treatment. This is the most significant number of patients waiting for any specialism. These figures are not improving. Our hospitals are understaffed, and some doctors’ shifts are being cancelled because of financial constraints. People have difficulties in finding GP appointments, especially in less well-off areas, so their health concerns get worse before treatment.

“Honour thy father and thy mother.”

Age Concern has just produced a heartbreaking report of the experience of older people, experiences of corridor care, left without access to toileting, left to die with no privacy. We have had stories like this brought to our campaign stalls.

Poverty is increasing in the United Kingdom. This means that more people are ill, again, especially in areas of high poverty. Heating and fuel prices will make life still harder this winter, especially for children.

So, we are facing a very difficult winter, and the NHS is not ready for it. Corridor care is already increasing, and we are seeing ambulance queues again. This is not just uncomfortable and humiliating for patients; it costs lives, about 250 per week, according to the Royal College of Emergency Medicine. The BMA have published a list of what can and should be done but we want more, we want immediate Government action on finance, on filling vacancies, and a return to the Bevan model of healthcare, as the NHS was founded to be, not to a milk cow for huge corporations.

At the core of the problem is the remodelling of the NHS on the appalling American model. The government can change that immediately.

Right now, the government could

1. Improve staffing and employ fully qualified professionals. There are 100,000 nurses who are qualified and registered but not working as nurses in the UK. More nurses, who have left the NHS, will have dropped their registration . Many resident doctors and GPs are unemployed.

2. Increase the number of hospital beds and intensive care provision (the intensive care might take a little more time)

3. Prioritise the NHS, not the private sector. All government health spending should go to patient care and staff conditions in the NHS. During the pandemic, Spain nationalised all private health facilities as a public health emergency. Here in the UK, the private sector is very small compared to the NHS, though the government seems keen to grow it.

4. Improve workforce planning as a matter of urgency.

5. Improve pay and working conditions for staff.

6. Improve the buildings.

7. Improve GP services, employ the unemployed GPs.

The NHS came from the people, not from the rich or famous, but from ordinary people demanding proper healthcare for all, rich or poor, man or woman, child or pensioner, black, white or brown. Trade unions, especially the National Union of Mineworkers, and women’s groups such as the Women’s Cooperative Guild, led the way. Our grandparents and great-grandparents fought for it in the early 20th century, and when the soldiers returned after defeating fascism, the NHS was established 77 years ago. The country was still smouldering from bombing and massively in debt, but we invested in the NHS, and it profoundly changed lives, especially women’s lives. Fewer women died in childbirth, and more babies survived. For many years, life expectancy rose, and we lived longer, healthier lives. We too can fight for the NHS like our grandmothers, great grandmothers and grandfathers , and we can win, making it safe for another 77 years.

There are actions you can take:

Talk to friends, family and workmates about the need to restore the NHS.
Raise it at work, in your union if you have one, and in the community organisations
Share this post. Post your own comments on social media.
Contact your local councillor. Many councillors don’t understand that Councils do have a say in the NHS. Each council has a representative on the Integrated Care Board. The changes the Government has been making increase the importance of that scrutiny function. The Council has a scrutiny system over health decisions that affect the locality. Liverpool has a Health and Well-being Board and a Children and Young People’s Well-being Scrutiny Committee. Wirral and Cheshire West have a Joint Health Scrutiny Committee.
Help us with our campaign. Leafleting your street would be a great help. Come to our meetings or set up a meeting about the NHS inyour area.
If you are active in an organisation, ask the organisation to join the Cheshire and Merseyside NHS Campaigns. Email takebackthenhs@proton.me
Write to your MP either with a detailed letter or a short one. Use our letter draft or write your own. Find the name of your MP here. Maybe try to get an appointment with them. Urgent government action would make an immediate difference. Right now, in these unpredictable times electorally, MPs are very sensitive to the possibility of losing votes if they ignore their electorate’s opinion!

Below, you can down load draft letters/emails to your MP, to use as they are or put into your own words – make sure though, that you put your own address on the letter so MPs are in no doubt you are one of their constituents.

letter to MPs short version Download

MP letter extended version Download

We will be continuing our coverage of this issue. We will hold meetings to discuss the winter crisis and plan the campaign. We need your help. Please send us your thoughts and experiences of using the NHS this winter, as well as your successes in getting the word out to the public. Please invite us to speak at meetings, large and small.

We sent this question to Cheshire and Merseyside ICB meeting on the 27th November 2025 about the Winter Crisis

“

“The winter crisis, as seen in corridor care in A and E and in very long waits for beds once a decision to admit was made, spread throughout the year.

The Winter Planning report, page 279, does not appear to reflect the experience of patients in this area, nor does it reflect the Royal College of Physicians’ report this autumn.Cheshire and Merseyside ICS – Urgent Emergency Care strategy for 2025/26 also does not seem to reflect the situation from the public’s point of view.

We recognise the dedication and hard work of staff in challenging situations, but they too seem angry about the problem, apologising to patients for having to treat them without privacy.

We note the focus on particular critical incidents, but the wear and tear on patients in the routine winter crisis must also be addressed. A five-hour wait is seen to be a feature in patients who have poor outcomes, including deaths.

The deep sadness and anger from older people at being treated in corridors must be heard and responded to.

What will be done to help staff navigate the tough times ahead?

What research has been done to find out why staff distrust the vaccines?

How do NHS staff who want the Covid vaccine get one?

What are the plans in case of a qualitatively higher level of illness than you currently expect (given the experience of the southern hemisphere this year)? What lee way is there for such an escalation?

“The winter crisis, as seen in corridor care in A and E and in very long waits for beds once a decision to admit was made, spread throughout the year.

We recognise the dedication and hard work of staff in challenging situations, but they too seem angry about the problem, apologising to patients for having to treat them without privacy.

The deep sadness and anger from older people at being treated in corridors must be heard and responded to.

What will be done to help staff navigate the tough times ahead?

What research has been done to find out why staff distrust the vaccines?

How do NHS staff who want the Covid vaccine get one?

We will publish their reply

October 9, 2025November 4, 2025

Campaigning to save Liverpool Women’s Hospital Autumn 2025

This article is a work in progress and is being amended and added to as events progress

25 October 2025, update.

The report on the future of Liverpool Women’s Hospital (Women’s Hospital Services in Liverpool programme) has been postponed again; this is their statement:

Save Liverpool Women’s Hospital

“To support options development, work to understand what each potential option would mean for estates (buildings), finance and workforce (staffing) has been taking place. This has been a complex process, and the level of detail required has meant that it has taken slightly longer to finish than had originally been planned. This means that the Women’s Services Committee will now consider the outputs of the work on potential options in November 2025 rather than October 2025. Following this, the Board of NHS Cheshire and Merseyside will discuss the potential options, and next steps, at a private meeting, which will also take place in November 2025.

The intention is that following the Board meeting, from December 2025 onwards, discussions will be held with partners, including local NHS trust boards and local authorities, about how the programme moves forward. At this point, if required, planning would also begin for an external review by clinicians from a different part of the country.

It is therefore likely that we will publish a further update about the programme during the first half of 2026. We know that many members of the public, NHS staff and wider stakeholders have a strong interest in women’s hospital services in Liverpool, and are keen to understand what will happen next. “

Our response

The “Women’s Hospital Services in Liverpool programme” is a working party of the Cheshire and Merseyside Integrated Care Board, the governing body of the NHS in Cheshire and Merseyside.

Liverpool Women’s Hospital’s future remains under threat, despite being one of the best buildings in the country and having an excellent reputation. The “options” mentioned in this statement have not been published.

This is at a time of enormous public concern about the state of Maternity services nationally, when we have yet another national report on Maternity scandals, plus police enquiries into deaths at two trusts. There have, of course, been many other detailed and complex enquiries whose recommendations were not implemented by the last government and are not being implemented by this government. It is no surprise, therefore, that campaign groups are forming across the country. For a decade, the future of Liverpool Women’s Hospital has been uncertain, with all the anxiety that has brought for pregnant women and families, for women needing gynaecology care, fetility care, for parents with babies in the Neonatal unit, and all the other services, for staff, both current staff and those who might have wanted to work at Liverpool Women’s but needed a secure future to commit to a move, and of course, the public vocifeously wanted to know that the hospital would be safe.

Liverpool Women’s Hospital’s future is under threat, despite the urgent need to retain and improve it, despite good work having been done in the last year to enhance its resources and services. Even before the Integrated Care Board was invented, plans to close it were underway. It was one of the first items on the ICB agenda when it opened.

Staff at Liverpool Women’s Hospital have worked so hard against the odds. The difficulties caused by privatisation, austerity, cuts, understaffing, and the disorganisation of the NHS over the last decade have been immense. Lord Darzi, in a report commissioned early in this government, described the 2012 Health and Care Act as “calamity without international precedent”. We say that the 2022 Act made things worse. The business model still pursued by this government has been a disaster for Maternity care nationwide.

Professor Marian Knight, Director of the National Perinatal Epidemiology Unit and MBRRACE-UK maternal reporting lead, said: ‘These data show that the UK maternal death rate has returned to levels that we have not seen for the past 20 years.“

Liverpool Women’s Hospital has retained an excellent reputation. It is a much-loved, much-needed hospital that provides for the birth of approximately eight thousand babies a year and more than ten thousand gynaecology procedures. It is a maternal medicine centre and a tertiary hospital.

The future of Liverpool Women’s Hospital was one of the first issues raised by the Integrated Care Board (ICB), the governing body of the NHS in Cheshire and Merseyside, when it was established in 2022. We believed then and still believe that finances are at the root of the plans to move, merge, or close Liverpool Women’s Hospital.

The Women’s Hospital Services in Liverpool Committee says that their process includes ”October to November 2025: Discussions with partners, including local NHS trust boards and local authorities, about the draft business case”

Annexe A to the reports fromLiverpool Women’s Hospital Prevention and

Equity Population Profile 2023-24 Date: 4 April 2025

(Author: Dr Clare Baker, Public Health Registrar) says, “There is a significant difference between demographics and experiences common among senior decision-makers and common among our patients” In other words, the people making the decisions do not live the same lives as the patients, yet they will not consult with the public before drawing up their plans.

(We have been challenged for the source of this quotation. It can be found on page 151 of the PDF for the cm-icb-board 240725-agenda and papers.)

Our campaign has significantly less access to information about what is happening at Liverpool Women’s Hospital since the semi-merger with the other hospitals in Liverpool, forming the University Hospitals of Liverpool group. Previously, some of our campaigners were able to attend the board meetings in person, read the public board meeting papers, hear the patient stories presented at each meeting, and ask questions. We could follow in detail issues such as infant and maternal mortality, staffing levels in Maternity and Gynaecology, and the hospital’s financial situation. We could, at times, bring home the reality for mothers and families. There was once a report on how they intended to spread the service across the city to clinics in “pram pushing” distance. When we saw the maps, we burst out laughing. Knowing the city, we assured the board that it would take some Olympic-level athletes to cover those distances! The relationships at those board meetings were generally friendly. Now, all we are allowed to do is attend the meeting of the combined group covering the Royal, Aintree, Boardbgreen, and the Women’s. This is soon to be expanded to include specialist hospitals. Such a meeting focuses primarily on finance and staffing issues. There is no midwife or obstetrician on that board.

We will refer to all papers from the Integrated Care Board (the governing body of the NHS in Cheshire and Merseyside) since its founding in 2022. What follows is from the papers for the first meeting of Cheshire and Merseyside ICB, pages 6 -9

“JGR noted that the clinical case for change is strong but felt that the public perception is that this is linked to the need to make cost savings. JGR asked what steps will be taken to counteract this view. FLE confirmed that there is a financial driver in that Liverpool Women’s Trust have been in a deficit position for some time and they are not in a position to rectify this. FLE highlighted that this is not the primary reason but agreed that there is a need for a careful public engagement process before it goes out to consultation” There is more discussion in these papers including saying tht Ormskirk maternity is also not co-located with a general hospital.

Had the time, energy, and resources wasted on this cost-cutting drive been devoted to improving services at Liverpool Women’s Hospital, we would have seen the day-to-day experiences of patients and staff significantly improved.

Throughout the ICB papers, it has been made clear that there is no likelihood of the capital (money) for rebuilding Liverpool Women’s on the Royal site, yet this rumour persists. It is, of course, within the power of the government, at the stroke of a pen, to create the resources needed for a rebuild or to adequately fund the hospital on Crown Street. Still, it seems highly unlikely that such a policy change will occur. If it were to happen, we would still say that the Liverpool Women’s Hospital should remain on Crown Street, as a women’s hospital, albeit with improvements. Of course, we also call for close collaboration on necessary medical matters with other hospitals. It was the damaging 2012 Health and Care Act, described by Lord Dazi in his report to the new Government as a “Calamity without precedent“, that made hospitals compete rather than cooperate

Why we say Liverpool Women’s Hospital should stay at Crown Street

It is a much-needed hospital. The experience of other Maternity hospitals closing and merging has not been successful; Maternity standards nationally have deteriorated.
Women’s needs have been neglected in the NHS for more than ten years. The creation of huge general hospitals has not helped.
Other Maternity hospitals are in a dire situation and need financial infrastructure support much more than Liverpool Women’s does. Please see this heartbreaking report.”There is a clear link between the condition of service infrastructure, the experience of service users and staff, and safety. In the last 3 years, there have been 14,519 formally reported instances in the Maternity and neonatal estate where clinical services have been interrupted or service delivery has been impacted as a direct result of poor physical conditions. Significant clinical time has been lost to estate-related issues, such as power outages, water leaks and faulty nurse call systems. This puts additional pressure on already stretched staff to provide high-quality and safe care and can directly lead to procedures delays, such as planned caesarean sections.“
The green site at Crown Street is a positive benefit to mothers in difficult times. The physical environment helps birth.
The Royal is located in one of the most densely trafficked areas in the city, with a 6-lane road running adjacent to it. This would be dangerous for babies’ lungs.

The argument that Maternity would be safer on the same site as the acute hospital is not borne out by the scandals in Maternity care in large hospitals. We cite Leeds Teaching Hospital as an example, but we support campaigners and staff in Leeds who are working to improve the situation. Current financing of Maternity care makes it difficult to provide safe care.

This is a national emergency. The government has called yet another Maternity Enquiry and is conducting a deep dive into 14 Maternity hospitals. Liverpool Women’s Hospital is not on that list. Yet another enquiry will not solve this. A serious consultation with mothers, families, staff, especially midwives, and concerned members of the public is required for all our mothers, sisters, daughters, friends, and loved ones, as well as every baby.

( For the list of other Maternity enquiries, see this.)

Baroness Amos is chairing the enquiry. The baroness, whilst having much government and academic experience, is not an expert in Maternity. It will be very challenging for her to reach a conclusion about important Maternity issues in a matter of weeks. Some bereaved parent groups have welcomed her appointment, others say this method of enquiry tries to place the blame on the Hospitals when it’s the system that’s caused the terrible problems.

We object to the government commissioning yet another enquiry when the recommendations of other detailed enquiries have not been financed or implemented. We agree with the parents’ groups that the investigation should cover the wider service, not just the hospitals, but also the NHS central organisation.

Liverpool Women’s Hospital is not in this list of hospitals to be investigated. Had the doom talk of the engagement meetings, organised by the ICB, been believed, it surely would have been.

Maternity outcomes have worsened in the years when Maternity hospitals and units have been closed or merged into the acute hospitals.”Professor Marian Knight, Director of the National Perinatal Epidemiology Unit and MBRRACE-UK maternal reporting lead, said: ‘These data show that the UK maternal death rate has returned to levels that we have not seen for the past 20 years. The 2023 MBRRACE-UK maternal confidential enquiry report identified clear examples of maternity systems under pressure and this increase in maternal mortality raises further concern. Ensuring pre-pregnancy health, including tackling conditions such as overweight and obesity, as well as critical actions to work towards more inclusive and personalised care, need to be prioritised as a matter of urgency now more than ever.“

Liverpool Women’s Hospital provides more than Maternity care. The CQC report says, “The Liverpool Women’s NHS Foundation Trust gynaecology division is a tertiary referral centre for gynaecology, performing approximately 10,000 procedures per year.”

Most Gynaecology services in most of the country are provided in general hospitals, and this has not alleviated the disproportionate waiting times for gynaecology treatment. Misogyny runs deep as this report from the London School of Economics shows. The resources have not been invested in the service for over a decade.

https://committees.parliament.uk/committee/328/women-and-equalities-committee/news/204316/medical-misogyny-is-leaving-women-in-unnecessary-pain-and-undiagnose

In 2022, the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists described the service as “a speciality which had been disproportionately impacted by a lack of capacity in the NHS long before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic”

In our area, gynaecology has the longest wait for any speciality. Nationally, for people of working age, the waiting lists for gynaecology are the largest.

Include the Public. Plans for the future of Liverpool Women’s Hospital are being drawn up, but without public input. The committee drawing up the plans says it will present its plans to a private meeting of the ICB (the governing body of the NHS in Cheshire and Merseyside) in November. Once all the planning is complete, they will conduct a public consultation. Yet, the real lives of patients are not the same as those of the people drawing up the plans. Their own papers say this. Our campaign has written to request inclusion in these discussions, but we have been refused. Previously, the ICB said we would be included.”The principle of Section 242 is that, by law, NHS Commissioners and Trusts must ensure that patients and / or the public are involved in certain decisions that affect the planning and delivery of NHS services

The threats to the future of Liverpool Women’s Hospital are continuing despite

The improvements in infrastructure and safety made at he hospital in recent years
The national Maternity crisis
The national problems ( and associated pain and suffering) with the Gynaecology waiting lists for treatment, and neglect of this service nationally.
Liverpool’s well-publicised issues with declining health among women (State of Health in the City: Liverpool 2040) and the hospital’s excellent reputation.
The distortion of NHS structures to suit the many facets of privatisation brought in by the 2012 and 2022 Health and Care Acts,
This government is increasing privatisation and bringing back advisers who led up to the 2012 Act and who are linked to the hated American health corporations.
The government is entrusting our most intimate data to companies like Palantir.
The decline in women’s health over the years of austerity.

More than 80,000 people have signed our petition, combining an online and a paper petition. We have held public meetings, produced leaflets, lobbied MPs, and spoken to union branches, community groups, churches, and mosques. We attend board meetings of the hospital (now a group of hospitals) and the Integrated Care Board. Our campaigners include people who have used the hospital, intend to use it when they have babies, whose families have used or are likely to use the hospital, people who work in the NHS and those who work elsewhere, academics, and manual workers. We include people who care deeply about the NHS but whose only expertise is as patients or carers, and we also have experts. We are part of a long tradition of Liverpool women fighting for better healthcare for women and babies. We welcome newcomers.

We say “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.

We need more midwives. Hospitals should cooperate, not compete.

We say improve national Maternity Outcomes. These are deteriorating and are worse than many poorer countries. Mothers’ experience of birth is increasingly traumatic. (Source MBRRACE report 2025.)

National Funding for maternity is still inadequate. We say improve the Maternity tariff, the funding formula the government uses to fund maternity.

“The maternity tariff is insufficient to cover costs of delivering the current maternity service in Liverpool, as is the case in many areas across the country.” says Liverpool Women’s Hospital Board

We need more midwives and need to improve maternity staffing and working conditions. Newly qualified midwives need jobs. It’s not rocket science.

Compensation. We are in the obscene situation where compensation for errors in the maternity service costs more than the whole service. Fund the service to stop the injuries that are so costly in pain and in finances.

Approximately 630,000 women nationwide are waiting for Gynaecology treatment. Improve Gynaecology services. No to cuts.

Thank you to everyone who turned out on September 28th for the protest at Labour’s Conference. Our campaign goes from strength to strength.

October 6, 2025October 9, 2025

Practical steps for the campaign to Restore, Repair, and Rebuild the NHS 2025.

Take the fight for the NHS to the communities and workplaces!

The NHS originated from working-class organisations, including unions, and crucially, among working-class communities, especially among working-class women. We have records of this on Merseyside.

Talk about the NHS with friends, family and people at work. Work with other campaigners to get the word out to communities through leaflets, stalls, research, public meetings, pickets, posters, conferences, and demonstrations. The NHS is ours, a legacy from the generation that defeated fascism and built the welfare state. Stop the daylight robbery of this service by huge corporations.

Help us lobby the ICB (the governing body of the NHS in Cheshire and Merseyside; there are similar organisations across the country). They are based on the US system of Accountable Care Organisations, designed for privatisation and profit-taking, denial of care, extracting charges from patients and downskilling of staff.

We are working on model resolutions to restore, repair, and rebuild the NHS, so you can move them at union branches (for unions that are not currently organising NHS workers). Your suggestions are most welcome.

We are building links with health service workers, but help with this would be most welcome.

We ask that political parties that do support a return to the Bevan model of healthcare ensure their political education and campaigning include the campaign to restore the NHS.

When the Labour Government in 1945 decided to set up the NHS, the core principles were clear.

Healthcare for all, free at the point of need.

A national universal service cooperating across the country.

A service which is funded as a public service and delivered by a publicly owned and controlled service.

A service that is a good employer employing fully qualified staff, which pays good wages and has manageable workloads without driving burnout.

We would add

Remove all privatisation.

Ban donations to politicians from the US health corporations

Our data is private. Kick out Palantir.

The country can and must afford good healthcare.

Our healthcare costs the government much less per person than the appalling US system. It is more cost-efficient than the European compulsory insurance systems. We need more funding, more hospital beds, more staff, and better buildings. Investment in healthcare builds an economy. Even the World Bank reports that investing in health is key to job creation and growth.

Take the fight for the NHS to the union branches. Make the NHS the talk of the workplace. Let’s not be quiet when people suffer without dignity or privacy on trollies in corridors this winter, not be quiet when babies die from inadequate care in the Maternity service.

There will be a severe political risk this winter if families feel helpless about the problems in the NHS. Our frustrations need a political and community response. Together, we might make the government listen, but the fight goes on even if Starmer continues to have cloth ears. We are fighting for the lives and health of our communities.

We are fighting for lives and dignity. Our area has enormous problems with poverty, and our babies are twice as likely to die around birth as babies in richer areas. Black babies have a greater risk in rich or poor areas, yet other countries do not experience the same problems. This is the outcome of Austerity and neoliberal health policies.

Last winter was grim in all our hospitals, and this year, they face the added burden of funding refusals from NHS England. We saw corridor care for days on end in September, let alone February, long waits in A&E, long waits for beds once “admitted”, and too high bed occupancy for infection prevention. Hospitals are expected to reduce staff as patient needs increase.

The NHS is fundamentally damaged by austerity and privatisation. The government has brought back the worst of New Labour’s privatisation, quacks, and advisers. Billions are being directed to private profit rather than treatment.

The Save Liverpool Women’s Hospital Campaign works with many other NHS campaigns, and we urge people to join us or another similar group local to you.

Contact us, and we will put you in touch or help set up a campaign group in your area. Defend our NHS organises in Wirral and Keep our NHS Public has Merseyside and Cheshire Branches. Most Trades Councils in Cheshire and Merseyside and the NHS camapign groups organise together on NHS issues.

For more information, please see this recent post. Join the campaign to restore, repair, and rebuild the NHS.

Save Liverpool Women’s Hospital.

Make the NHS a core campaign in building a new generation of resistance in the UK. If you are already deeply involved in another core campaign, let’s collaborate on building links. Housing and the environment are key to the nation’s health, as is the right to food. Women’s rights, disability rights and anti-racism work are key to reversing poor outcomes in the NHS. These campaigns should build their links.

We won in 1945 for the NHS, and we can win again.

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