A year ago Save Liverpool Women’s Hospital Campaign held our second demonstration. We campaign for our mothers, daughters, sisters, friends and lovers and for each and every baby. We campaign for a fully funded NHS, for improved healthcare for women and babies and for the hospital to remain open and on its existing garden site.
Continue reading “The NHS comes from the People and belongs to the People”
Women can give birth at home in Liverpool using the NHS.
There is no sane case for commissioning another private for profit Maternity provider. This idea of bringing in yet another for profit provider was raised, in passing, at a health and social care select committee meeting in Liverpool this week. It follows the One to One company closing and causing significant hardship to pregnant women and to the midwives working for them.
Continue reading “Maternity Care is for the mother and baby, it is no place to be making profit.”
Speak out for the NHS. Speak out for proper funding, proper staffing, decent buildings and for democratic control. Democracy means the government of the people, for the people by the people, with the right to speak out and speak up. The NHS, it is said, will last as long as there are people prepared to fight for it. Good care is still provided in may aspects of the NHS but the system is suffering significant damage. If enough of us speak out and mobilise in our workplaces and communities, we can save and improve the NHS. This is no time for despair or helplessness.
In this article, we are looking at care in pregnancy, delivery and post-natal care. The occasion for this article is the closure of One to One Midwives, a private, for profit company, contracted by the NHS.
Continue reading “For fully funded NHS maternity care, publicly provided.”
Save Liverpool Women’s Hospital campaign have called a national meeting on Sat 5th October to discuss the crisis in maternity in the NHS and how we can oppose the Tory government agenda for maternity. Tickets can be obtained here
Continue reading “Crisis in Maternity Care”Breast reduction is one of many operations the NHS is beginning to refuse to do on the basis that it is “of low clinical worth“. We challenge this. We believe this refusal is part of rationing of treatments, especially treatments for conditions where private health sector has been established. Moreover the My Choices scandal saw attempts to charge for these operations within the NHS itself. It is rationing care, funding the private sector and depriving those without funds of treatment that can stop pain and be life changing.
Continue reading “Breast reduction is not of low clinical worth”
We are pleased to publish here a letter written by veteran community campaigner, and staunch supporter of Save Liverpool Women’s Hospital Campaign, Maria Oreilly
Maria writes to protest the idea of building, on the grass area immediately opposite the hospital and building high flats on this narrow strip of land. Please give Maria and the local community your support
To whom it make concern
Re Parliament Street Planning Consent June 2019
I wish to raise objection to the decision to allow the high rise development on the grass verge, lined with eco-friendly trees, opposite the women’s hospital and on the same side as Princes School the brain injuries unit , which is overlooking the social housing estate of pensioners’ bungalows and multiracial young families social housing homes.
I believe this decision is flying in the face of all the policy development the council is beginning to look at re climate change environmental and clean air, in addition, the council’s responsibilities for the health and well-being of its citizens is compromised by this decision
This is a multiracial area set in a beautiful natural environmental setting which contributes immeasurably to air quality and the impact of air pollution on residents young children young newborn babies at the women’s hospital and disabled children and the brain injury disabled residents
Parliament Street is a busy road which already has pollution from traffic travelling into the city, industrial sites Renshaw’s and Parliament Business Park which adds to traffic accessing the sites it is the main thoroughfare for traffic and busy bus route into the city centre. This street coupled with Georgian residential buildings and tree-lined green space is both attractive and contributes much to the air quality
In 2018 I submitted a report from American environmentalists to the then chair of neighbourhood and communities cabinet member Steve Mumby and Cllr Natalie Nicolas which gave scientific evidence of the damage air pollution caused to the neurological development of children and the negative effects on the elderly and those with chest and heart and lungs problems.
I circulated this document as I was concerned for the children at school on Laurence Road which( besides being open to passersby to converse with the children, which is a safeguarding issue, due to inadequate fencing) has little tree or greenery to combat the constant air pollution caused by traffic which constantly travels within 5/6 foot of the playground
This American report raised serious concerns for the neurological development of children and its findings showed that those areas most affected were areas of deprivation and were predominately those of minority African American and Latino schoolchildren were schooled
I understand Cllr Noakes now has clean air responsibility and in a city with a confirmed health threat already to our lungs and the fact that a baby born today in Liverpool will have thirteen years less good health than a baby born in Richmond we should be concerned
About building on a green space in this location on Parliament Street, removing mature trees and increasing pollution the city council planning permission awarded for this development, despite opposition from residents local councillors and the scientific evidence in the council’s possession. This flies in the face of good governance, and the logic of policy debate on climate change and doesn’t show joined-up thinking across Cabinet. One thing laughing at the other?
I also wonder, as a matter of equal treatment of its citizens, if Liverpool City Council had decided to grant planning permission in Allerton, as an example, for a high rise block to overlook a settled homeownership community, on one of their tree-lined grass verges, destroying trees, overlooking homes, invading privacy, increasing traffic next to a school and a brain injury unit, and opposite a maternity hospital, thus increasing air pollution, would it have sailed through without call in? There would have been protest at that, even without the additional scientific aggravating factors of the effect of air quality and neurological damage on children etc
I doubt you would have even considered it!!!!!
I believe this needs an environmental health impact assessment given its location and proximity to those with disabilities and young children and this development’s potential impact raises important social and health factors so serious that an equality assessment is needed urgently as it raises a poverty issue, disability and race equality issues
I understand the three councillors for the ward have objected and that Cllr Emily Spurrell planning committee objected along with residents, the issues I raise add to these objections and should be cause to reconsider and rescind this planning decision.
Yours faithfully
Maria O’Reilly
In June 2019, the NHS is in significant danger. In 2015 we started the fight to protect the Liverpool Women’s Hospital. This struggle is and will be inseparable from the overall campaign to defend and improve the NHS locally and nationally.
Continue reading “Only with your efforts”Is press and publicity manipulation aimed at Labour Party Conference a suitable use of NHS money and time?
The local management of the NHS and Liverpool Women’s Hospital want fundamental and unpopular change. They applied for money to rebuild the Hospital on the site of the benighted Royal Liverpool University Hospital. Unsuprisingly they did not get the money.
The team behind these plans includes the local STP, the CCG, and the Liverpool Women’s Hospital Trust. To push these plans they have used the media in many ways. They claim that their media intervention was successful in reducing the imapct of our demonstration to Labour Party Conference in September 2018. “The impact of the demonstration march was perceived to be less than the campaign group’s previous activities”.
The state of the NHS, with under funding, privatisation, reorganisations in favour of big corporations, outsourcing, low pay, cuts in services and rationing of care is profoundly political, but interevening to affect a demonstation to Labour’s Conference is hardly aceptable even in that context. It is a questionale use of NHS resources.
More than our campaign’s entire budget will have been spent on this media offensive. This is taxpayer money that should have been spent on patient care, in a city with really poor health oucomes and where nearly twice as many babies dying before the age of one than the national average.
Our Campaign to Save Liverpool Women’s Hospital has large and widespread public support, and our campaign fundamentally disagrees with this plan. We want to keep a women’s hospital and to keep it on its current low rise and green site. We object to spending more than £100million on the project when women and babies in Liverpool face major health issues.
Our petition has 46,000 signatories, online and many more on paper. Our campaign has gained support from Labour Party branches and even Labour’s conference. Diane Abbott MP, Emily Thornberry MP, and Jonathon Ashworth MP (Labour’s spokesperson on the NHS) have all spoken at our demonstrations. The campaign is now in its 4th year.
We support the work of Liverpool Women’s Hospital. It has remarkable successes and dedicated, hard working staff. Most of Liverpool’s Babies are born at Liverpool Women’s Hospital, and it has many excellent services. We are aware of problems and difficulties, but LWH is well worth protecting.
In the context of the Climate Emergency and major concerns about air quality, putting the birth of the the majority of Liverpool babies in an air polluted traffic islnd and highrise blocks seems frankly ridiculous.
In key documents at the Liverpool Women’s Hospital Board Meeting on 2nd May 2019, this document ‘Strategic Aims and our Corporate Objectives 2018/19’ was presented.
Included in he report were these sections.
“..the need for a move, more decisively, to a multidisciplinary hospital site within 5-10 years.”
Commissioner support retained despite lack of success in STP Capital bid, with plans for a way forward being developed.”
Recent developments of note where these key messages were used occurred during September 2018 in advance of the Labour Party Conference. The Trust referred to the key messages to counter a planned demonstration against the plans for the future by a local campaign group. The Trust’s key messages received significant media, online, social media and public exposure with an overall average reach/audience for TV/radio/printed news of over 410k and an average reach/audience for LWH social media and website posts of almost 40k. The impact of the demonstration march was perceived to be less than the campaign group’s previous activities due to our proactive factual messaging and anecdotally the Trust feels that stakeholder understanding about our future is now more clearly understood as a result.
The board claim that;
“Dialogue is ongoing with NHSE, MPs, councillors and other stakeholders to ensure the case for change is well understood”
So in this context they feel it is acceptable to pay for whole page adverts in free sheets and in the Liverpool Echo? Is it right to be putting forward a whole major media intervention?
When the plan to “move” Liverpool Women’s Hospital was first launched they ran a story about how dangerous it was ro transfer women to other hospitals but now somehow the figures for transfers, the main plank of the earlier media message, have dramatically dropped to just one!
Save Liverpool Women's Hospital 