Fighting for another seventy seven years of the NHS.

Restore the NHS

It is seventy-seven years since the NHS was founded. It was a gift to the generations that followed them from those who fought all-out war and defeated fascism in World War 2. It made a dramatic difference to the lives of babies and mothers.

Before the NHS, if you did not have the money, you did not get healthcare. The number of babies that died at birth was horrific. In the 1930s, more women died in childbirth than men died working in the dangerous mines.

There were multiple campaigns for a universal health system since the early 20th Century from working-class women’s groups, notably the Cooperative Women’s Guild, and from the trade unions, especially the National Union of Miners, and from socialist doctors. One of these socialist doctors, Dr Benjamin Moore was from Liverpool. He started his campaign in 1910, so thirty long years before the NHS was established. Let’s learn from history and demand a return to the original model of the NHS.

Join our campaigns so you can see better healthcare in your life time and leave such just a legacy for your grandchildren and great-grandchildren. We need a people powered campaign to Restore and Repair the NHS.

Ordinary women led the fight for the NHS. Fight like your great Grandmothers to get better health care.

The NHS is badly damaged at present, and we take little comfort from the government’s liking for giving NHS money to the private providers, nor from the Ten-year Plan announced in early July 2025 https://www.england.nhs.uk/long-term-plan/

We will print a detailed review of this plan shortly.

We are especially disappointed by how little is said about the state of maternity care in this report. We and other maternity and women’s health campaigns submitted reports to this plan, but we see nothing from it except the promise of yet another report. We need action now on birth trauma, the maternity tariff, staffing levels, recruitment and retention of staff, peace and respect in the whole process of fertility, pregnancy, giving birth and postnatal care. We need action on the neglect of Gynaecology treatment and on women’s lifelong health and healthcare,

Governments since Thatcher have moved against the founding NHS model of universal health care in favour of allowing companies to use it for profit; yet the American system which they base their case on, is plain wrong, cruel, and widely hated.

“In one stark example, a Facebook post by UnitedHealth Group expressing sadness about UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson’s death received 62,000 reactions – 57,000 of them laughing emojis. UnitedHealth Group is the parent company of UnitedHealthcare, the division that Thompson ran“.

Let’s ensure that people in the UK now and those yet to come have good and timely healthcare, free at the point of need, as a public service, funded by the state. It should be a national organisation available to all humans, young and old, black, white and brown, rich and poor alike. It should be designed for human good, not profit. There should be well-qualified staff with good education and training, with bursaries and good salaries. The hospitals and community health services should work together and not be in competition. The service should be reasonably close to home with good transport links. Privatisation should become a thing of the past, as it is a waste of public resources. Report after report describes the damage done by outsourcing and privatisation.

The NHS system of health care is cost efficient, and effective, far cheaper for the government than the US system despite the health insurance people pay, and gives far better outcomes, health, and life expectancy. We live longer than people in the US and in less fear of getting ill. US maternal mortality and infant mortality is far higher than that of other rich nations. 

Let’s fight to restore and repair the NHS so the generations that follow us are also free from fear. Bevan’s book “In Place of Fear” wrote of the fear ordinary families had of getting ill, of their children or family members falling ill, before health care was a right, when it was a commodity they could not afford and often did without, in pain and fear. Memories of life before the NHS are fading as the generation that created the NHS has passed.

The NHS improved the health and wealth of the nation and even conservative governments had to pretend to be in favour of the NHS

The founding of the NHS was bitterly opposed by the Conservatives but welcomed by ordinary people and many GPs.

For seventy-seven years, the people of Britain have had the right to healthcare free at the point of need. If you are younger than 77 years old you need never have paid for healthcare, except through your normal contributions to the country. There are now sadly a long list of charges you might now face for dentisty, for prescriptions, for earwax removal, fertilty treatment and more but still not for hugely expensive life saving operations or chemo. Battered and damaged, the NHS is still alive and kicking, and worth us demanding its restoration and repair.

“A free health service is a triumphant example of the superiority of collective action and public initiative applied to a segment of society where commercial principles are seen at their worst.”

People in the UK can still go to the doctors or to the hospital without a credit card or health insurance. No one in the UK needs to go bankrupt from medical bills. life saving and life improving work is delivered day by day.

That’s not the way it works in the USA; the model that governments refer to when they want to make changes to the NHS.The model that has trained the advisers the government appoints and the model liked by many who have made donations to Government ministers.

For sixty of those years, the NHS  was the best health service in the world. However, we have had to fight to defend it again and again. That popular defence is needed now more than ever.

Americans camapigning for full health care

Real damage has been done to the NHS since the time of Margaret Thatcher, by her and and subsequent Governments. Although Blair put money into the NHS, he also laid the groundwork for many forms of privatisation. This article gives a timeline of privatisation in our NHS.

5th July 1948, The National Health Service NHS was founded. It was designed to provide healthcare free at the point of need for everyone in Britain. It was to be a national, publicly funded, publicly delivered, comprehensive, not-for-profit health service, with fully qualified staff. This project was led by the Left-Wing Labour MP and Minister for Labour, Nye Bevan, a former miner.

The NHS Model was the most cost-effective, efficient, and equitable system, with the bulk of the money provided by the government going directly to patients, staff, and buildings. In the US system, the government pays twice as much per person as in Britain, and then patients have to pay large insurance premiums and copays.

The NHS  has been badly damaged by years of privatisation and underfunding, from the early days of the NHS. On April 23rd 1951 Bevan resigned when the first charges in the NHS, for prescriptions, were introduced to pay for armaments.

It is likely that governments thought that privatising, disorganising, cutting, outsourcing understaffing and underfunding the NHS would finish it off, that it would fall apart much more than it has done. What stood in their way was the huge and relentless efforts made by the staff to keep the service going, sometimes at the cost of their own health and wealth.We thank the NHS staff .

The cost of the corporate profit model of healthcare is huge, but the damage is not just to people’s money, but also to access to healthcare and to the quality of care. The financial cost to the people of the USA of this privatised for-profit model of healthcare is estimated at $2 trillion per year. In 2023 25.3million people in the USA had no health insurance and are liable for the full cost of their treatment which can lead to bankruptcy. Sixty percent of all bankruptcy is caused by medical bills and Trumps Big Beautiful Bill which just went through the senate is likely to increase the numbers without health insurance and funding for hospitals.

Our campaign to Save Liverpool Hospital is one of many across the country, and we work together. We have won more than 81,000 signatures between our on line and on paper petitions, and gained much public support. Please join in.

Funding refusal hits Cheshire and Merseyside NHS Hospitals.

June 5th 2025

Use the links if you wish, but they are not essential to understanding the information.

The campaign wagon that we use when we can collect enough donations.

NHS University Hospitals of Liverpool Group Board meeting.

As members of the public, we have attended the ICB and the Liverpool Women’s Hospital Board meetings for some years and attended the NHS University Hospitals of Liverpool Group Board meeting on June 5th, 2025.

We heard that because the ICB was refused the funding it requested, all Cheshire and Merseyside Hospitals and many other services must change their financial plans for the worse. However, the Trusts are not allowed to reduce their planned services! This must increase pressure on the frontline NHS workforce. Staffing is a large part of all NHS spending and is crucial to patient care.

Note: “Cost Improvement Plans” are cuts. Yes, a large organisation like the NHS must be on the watch for potential savings, but the system is used to enforce cuts.

The ICB reported that “On April 30th 2025 the ICB submitted a compliant plan ( which has resulted in both the ICB and every Cheshire and Merseyside Trust provider taking on additional cost improvement requirements (resulting in an aggregate deficit across the 16 NHS providers of c£228m offset by a surplus for the ICB of £50m). This compliant plan will enable us to spend our allocation, plus the additional £178m of deficit support funding (equivalent of 2.2% of our allocation) during the 2025/26 financial period. Whilst agreeing a plan was essential to securing the deficit support and cash to underpin this, our attention must turn now to the effective delivery of the plan and effectively mitigating the risks“.

Like Oliver in the workhouse, the ICB asked for more Picture credit

See our commentary on the May 2025 ICB board here.

We have always opposed the ICB system imposed by the 2022 Health and Social Care Act. Streeting is giving us more of the same.

We have observed how trusts negotiate their funding with the ICB. They agree on a plan for services, treatments, and the required money. It is a complex operation with oversight from outside bodies. The ICB takes all the plans for all the services in the area to NHS England and agrees on funding levels. Negotiations continue during the year for next year’s funding. The NHSE rewards trusts that do well in certain areas and has just announced some capital funding for buildings and extra services, including mental health in the acute hospitals. This, though, we are told, is not additional money. This carrot-and-stick funding is inappropriate and wasteful; it just lets a few positive headlines help some MPs.

The ICBs ( separate and distinct from the Hospitals and provider services) face significant cuts in their functions and funding as Wes Streeting implements his peculiar plans for the NHS.

The Government spends less on healthcare than other advanced countries.

 Wes Streeting, the Labour Secretary of  State for Health and Social Care, has proclaimed that the NHS will get no extra funding without “major surgery” and reform, including more use of the private sector.

The Health Service Journal reports that his year, “Integrated care boards and trusts are collectively aiming to make efficiency savings of 7.1 per cent or £11bn.”

These cuts are imposed while the winter crisis in our hospitals lives on through the summer in some places and is unlikely to improve next winter. At the same time, we have unemployed GPs, people needing GP care, and more than six million people waiting for treatment.

Women’s health sees some of the longest waiting lists, and our Maternity outcomes urgently need to be improved. Women hold up half the sky and make up nearly 80% of the NHS workforce. They are more likely to think of the NHS when voting. Yet our healthcare is disrespected in so many ways. The country has a Maternity crisis, and mental health care is severely damaged. Social care is a disgrace.

Liverpool Women’s Hospital is now part of the NHS University Hospitals of Liverpool Group, which comprises The Royal, Aintree, Broadgreen, and Liverpool Women’s Hospital. Other Liverpool Hospitals will also join the Group soon. “Liverpool Heart and Chest will join by September this year, the Walton Centre by December, and the Clatterbridge Cancer Centre by March 2026.”

(No, you didn’t miss the public consultation about the creation of this Group because there was none.)

Liverpool Women’s Hospital is still technically a separate Trust; however, the final say now rests with this group board, none of whom, as far as we can tell, have obstetric or midwifery expertise.

“Although LUHFT and LWH will remain in operation as statutory entities, in all other aspects, they will delegate authority to NHS University Hospitals of Liverpool Group (UHLG)”.

Hospitals receive funding via the ICB. They also agree on their planned treatments and urgent and emergency care Plans with the ICB. The Trusts are paid for what they plan to deliver.

 The Trusts and the ICB had drawn up these plans in detail. NHSE had appointed outside bodies, like Price Waterhouse Coopers,  to work with the  Liverpool boards and the ICB to oversee their finances and to reduce spending. It was just such a worked-out package that NHSE  declined. Further,  NHSE  would withdraw previous deficit funding of over £176m to Cheshire and Merseyside if the books were not balanced. Each Trust was given far less money than they expected.

The CEO of the Liverpool Group explained that, having received less funding, they had to decide which services to cut. But, they were then told they still had to meet the original service targets with less money.

So, Liverpool Women’s Hospital is facing more financial problems. It is a small hospital whose funding is determined by the Maternity tariff, and the Maternity tariff( funding) is inadequate across the country.

These national cuts are a policy decision distinct from previous years. They come after years of Austerity, privatisation, and underfunding in the NHS. Sadly, this Government’s policies are little different from the last.

Campaigns do make a difference. If you fight, you might just win.The more people involved, the more likely we are to win. So, we have to campaign harder and draw more people into the campaigns to Restore and Repair the NHS.

The NHS came from ordinary people, unions, women’s organisations and community groups. That is to whom we must turn again. Please join the campaigns to restore and repair the NHS. Contact us for details on how you can help.

There may well be some waste and overspending in the NHS. These cuts happen while more than six million people are waiting for treatment. Some treatments, like those for endometriosis and young people’s mental health, need to improve. We need democracy and community oversight in the NHS.

When our campaigners go to meetings and read their papers, we still have limited sight of what’s going on and only retired people really have the time to attend these meetings.

On June 5th, we could not even hear crucial sections of the meeting where significant changes in the funding and delivery of services were being discussed. We were “told off “for asking them to speak up in what is supposed to be “a meeting held in public.” They have promised to use microphones at the next meeting. There is no effective democratic scrutiny of the NHS.

This new board format shows less detail of Liverpool Women’s Hospital matters. We do not, for example, see the staffing fill rates for different services as an issue that matters very much to women giving birth. From the reports that we did see, we learned that Liverpool Women’s Hospital has a significant waiting list for Gynaecology treatment:

“Gynaecology remains a challenged speciality nationally in terms of long waits and capacity constraints. At LWH, referrals into the Gynaecology suspected cancer pathway have significantly increased over the last 3 years, increasing from 3,500 per year in 2021/22 to 6,000 per year in 2024/25 – a 71% increase. Demand has been exacerbated by changes in the Post Menopausal Bleeding pathway as well as significant long waits for General Gynaecology services. LWH is also the Tertiary provider for Gynaecological Cancer across Cheshire & Merseyside.” Page 239 in the Board papers

The hospital is opening three new “ambulatory” (daytime) treatment rooms. However, increased demand has already shown a need for still more capacity and money to fund that capacity. We were told that close work with other cancer teams across the Group and support from across Cheshire and Merseyside are helping to develop an effective plan to drive down this waiting list.

Gynaecology has one of the longest waiting lists across the country.

In March 2025, Endometriosis UK wrote New data shows the non-cancer gynaecology lists continuing to stand at over 580,000 women in England alone, with women waiting months and even years with serious, progressive conditions, including endometriosis.

 In December 2024, The Guardian wrote that waiting lists for gynaecology appointments across the UK had more than doubled since February 2020. Records show around three-quarters of a million (755,046) women’s health appointments are waiting to happen – up from 360,400 just before the pandemic..

The NHS should be a nationwide, publicly delivered, well-funded and well-staffed service. Our campaign always called for cooperation between hospitals and rejected the Conservative ideas of competition between hospitals and bringing the market economy into the NHS.

Unsurprisingly, pressure is being put on the workforce to work harder. All kinds of stunts are coming in, like outsourcing, insourcing (not the same as bringing services back in-house), changing how bank nurses are paid, not filling vacancies and more privatisation. Privatisation is not more cost-effective, nor does it deliver better patient outcomes. Services, too, will be cut.

It is unacceptable that the Government is imposing such a scale of cuts while we wait for treatment.

We learned little of the plans currently being drawn up for the future of “Women’s Hospital Services in Liverpool”. We questioned whether staff at LWH had been told that one option was a new build on the Royal site. It seems it was mentioned at a staff briefing, but only as a reference to the options years ago. The ICB had categorically ruled out a new build for Liverpool Women’s Hospital on the old Royal site, and the site has been agreed upon as a new building for the university. The Echo reported on June 5th about more details for the site of the old Royal, including an improved entrance to the Royal Hospital. There is no mention of a rebuild for Liverpool Women’s Hospital, although plans can change until construction starts.

We want the Liverpool Women’s Hospital to be properly funded and staffed and to remain on the Crown Street site in cooperation with other hospitals.

Our huge petition, online and on paper, says

“Save the Liverpool Women’s Hospital. No closure. No privatisation. No cuts. No merger. Reorganise the funding structures, not the hospital. Our babies and mothers, our sick women deserve the very best.”

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. #one born. The driving force for closure is a clumsy funding structure not the needs of women and babies. The alternative of wards in the new Royal is not an equivalent.

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

We campaign to save Liverpool Women’s Hospital, to Restore, Repair the NHS, and to make the NHS a great place to work. Please help. Combining our paper and online petitions, we have 81,470 signatures. Please help us get even more. Our work includes petitions, leaflets, stalls, rallies, working with other Maternity campaigns and with community groups, unions, Keep Our NHS Public, and other NHS campaign groups, our Facebook page, and this blog aims to provide information and help campaign organisation.

Proposals for the future of Liverpool Women’s Hospital seem likely to be published before the end of the year. They will then have to go to a public consultation.

We heard on our stalls that staff at Liverpool Women’s Hospital had been told that the hospital would be rebuilt on the site of the demolished old Royal. We asked the ICB, “There is mention of a meeting with the LWH staff to reassure them about the process. Was there mention of the likelihood of funding for a new building on the Royal Site? We have been told that this happened, but this contradicts earlier statements from this board. ”

We asked the Hospitals Group board,” Regarding Women’s services in Liverpool, has the suggestion of a new Liverpool Women’s Hospital at the Royal site been raised with staff either at the Royal or LWH?“

The ICB answered. “There was a staff engagement event in February 2025. This event was to update staff on the progress and next steps of the programme i.e. the development of an options appraisal process. Consideration of the funding requirements are a part of that process for developing potential options to address the risks identified; this will be both capital and revenue costs. This was discussed in general and hypothetical terms only, as no funding decisions have been made at this point.”

We need clarity on this. If staff are being reassured by ideas of a significant new build, an idea that contradicts what the public has been told repeatedly, there is a lack of clarity.

Meanwhile, the fight to protect and improve healthcare for all our mothers, sisters, daughters, friends, lovers, and every baby continues in these grim circumstances.

Our grandparents and great-grandparents fought for and won the NHS as healthcare for all, free at the point of care, publicly provided, funded by the government, providing the best available treatment in a timely fashion. The impact of the NHS on women’s lives was profound. The NHS was won at a time of hardship in the British economy, when Liverpool and other cities were still full of bomb sites. Our current period of cuts and closures, of declining outcomes and greater birth trauma, is robbing us of the legacy left to us by the generation that defeated fascism. Fight for our healthcare like your grandparents, great-grandparents, and even great-great-grandparents. In the early 20th Century, the working-class women of Liverpool fought long and hard for better healthcare and won it. We can do that too.

Build Resistance to NHS cuts

Restore and Repair the NHS: June 2025; It does not have to be this way!

Last Thursday, May 29th, 2025, campaigners from Save Liverpool Women’s Hospital and Restore and Repair the NHS attended the Cheshire and Merseyside Integrated Care Board meeting. It was a truly grim meeting. The significant cuts that the ICB faces to its funding at a time of great stress to the services and our communities are a disgrace, and this lies at this Government’s feet. The blame for what this body did lies squarely with the Government, but the personal responsibility cannot be shirked.

Do not give up!

We are angry but far from giving up: “Do not appeal, do not beg, do not grovel. Take courage, join hands, stand beside us, fight with us.” (Christabel Pankhurst). Please join us and all who fight to restore and repair the NHS.

Great work goes on day after day in our NHS, but a lack of staff, resources, beds, and funding puts huge strain on the staff and damages the experience and outcomes for patients.

Problems at the ICB

The ICB system nationally is facing huge changes, financial cuts, and staff redundancies. yes the last govenment caused terrible harm. The Government has not done a risk assessment on these changes, and the impact of the Government’s financial decisions has been severe.

ICB Funding.

Hospitals are funded via the ICB. During the pandemic, hospitals were funded according to the treatments they provided. Now they must tailor their work to the money provided.

Let us be clear: This country can afford better health care. Healthcare is a great investment and provides a return on money invested financially, socially, and in creating a healthier workforce.

In 2024/25, the Cheshire and Merseyside ICB told NHSE it could not match the sum allocated to its planned spending. Seven other ICBs were in the same position. The Cheshire and Merseyside NHS budgets include all sixteen hospitals and primary care. Earlier in the year, they were given £178 million ‘deficit support’ ( a loan that must be paid back over several years). This was, however, still not enough to balance the books.. The ICB board met with the NHSE board, who said that if they did not balance the books/make cuts, then the £178m would be withdrawn and they would have to make £178m further cuts. The ICB must now work with each hospital to see where these cuts can be made. “On April 30th 2025 the ICB submitted a compliant plan which has resulted in both the ICB and every Cheshire and Merseyside Trust provider taking on additional cost improvement requirements (resulting in an aggregate deficit across the 16 NHS providers of c£228m offset by a surplus for the ICB of £50m.)This can be seen on page 8 of the board papers.

The ICB must also reduce its spending to meet national averages, as the area started with higher funding. Cheshire and Merseyside have the highest per-person funding, representing greater need here. But it is to be reduced over a number of years.

Wouldn’t it be good if the Government reduced poverty and ill health, too? They could start by responding to the Medact campaign for homes for all.

an Echo Photo of a protest to keep the inpatient ward in Marie Curie

The Marie Curie campaigners to keep the Woolton hospice inpatient ward open, spoke in the public questions session at the start of the ICB meeting. They spoke movingly about the need for end-of-life care, but no concrete proposals were made to save it. The responsibility is shared between the ICB and the charity.

The hospice campaign is doing such a good job,we give them our full support.

Isues at the ICB meeting

  • The NHS is facing harm nationally and locally. The Government and the NHS bodies are aware of this. The ICB’s finances come from the Government.
  • The highest risks shown in the May ICB papers are “Lack of Urgent and Emergency Care capacity and restricted flow across all sectors (primary care, community, mental health, acute hospitals and social care) results in patient harm and poor patient experience.”
  • Too few hospital beds and the chaos of the privatised social care system are behind the “lack of flow.”
  • Maternity. There have been many prestigious reports on the crisis in Maternity., many parent groups are fighting for answers. The UK has poor infant mortality rates. In England, the mortality rate for infants living in the 10% most deprived areas was over twice the mortality rate for infants living in the 10% least deprived areas. Maternal Mortality has risen “The maternal death rate increased to 13.41 deaths per 100,000 pregnancies between 2020 and 2022, according to figures published by the MBRRACE-UK investigation into maternal deaths in the UK. The figure was 8.79 in the period 2017 to 2019.” It is the highest death toll since 2003-05, when the maternal death rate stood at 13.95 deaths per 100,000.
  • Liverpool Women’s Hospital is featured twice in the ICB  register of risks, once because it is”not compliant” financially. Although Liverpool Women’s Hospital is the centre of attention as the largest Maternity service, financial and staffing problems are shared nationwide. There is a national Maternity crisis, with Nottingham currently in the spotlight. Leeds has also reported problems following parental complaints. Wes Streeting, Secretary of State for Health and Social Care,  has apologised to bereaved parents (as reported in the Health Service Journal). £100m was invested into improving Maternity safety annually following the publication of an interim report into poor care at the Shrewsbury and Telford NHS trust. However, the Royal College of Midwives reported that this national Service Development Funding (SDF) for Maternity services will drop from £95m in 2024-25 to just £2m in 2025-26. The Royal College of Midwives said, “These budget cuts are more than shocking; they will rip the heart out of any moves to improve Maternity safety. The Government has taken a wrecking ball to work that’s being done up and down the country to improve Maternity safety, something which is desperately needed.” When questioned, the ICB did not share Gill Walton’s concern. Yet Ormskirk Hospital Maternity service, one of the ICB’s Maternity providers, receives a requires improvement rating from the CQC, Liverpool Women’s Hospital requires more funding.
  • Our campaign to Save Liverpool Women’s Hospital is inextricably linked to the need to fully restore the NHS as a national, publicly owned, publicly provided, democratically accountable service, well-funded and well-staffed. There is a national Maternity crisis due to understaffing and underfunding. The situation for the Liverpool Women’s Hospital was not directly addressed, however, the path the ICB started on with the Engagement process last year is carrying on and that Liverpool Women’s Hospital cannot function without additional funding, but that is true of Maternity nationally. It is unclear when we will hear more of the plans for Liverpool Women’s Hospital.
  •  Poverty and ill health. The problems in poverty, ill health  and life expectancy
The Mother Statue at Liverpool Women’s Hospital

The fundamental problems are understaffing, inadequate resources, privatisation and underfunding. Few people expected the situation to continue and the issues to deepen after the Conservatives were booted out of Government. For an assessment of what the Labour Government has done, see here. We started this new Government with fewer beds and doctors per head of population than other advanced countries like France, Germany and Spain.

Labour MPs are publicising the Repairs funding the Government are giving to our hospitals but the underlying situation is a disgrace. It is a bit like an abusive husband deigning to repair the roof. The cuts to main services outweigh this, but do some MPs even know, or bother to find out?

The ICB model imposed on the NHS in 2022 is fundamentally flawed. It uses commercial rather than public service systems . Privatised public services do not work well, and mixed public and privatised health care, as we now have it in the NHS, is wasteful and damaging.

The level of funding for healthcare in the UK is inadequate and below the level provided in other advanced economies.”Among the G7, the group of advanced economies to which the UK is most commonly compared, the UK is the joint lowest spender, regardless of how we measure spend. A 2022 table puts us 37th in the international spend per head of population. Another study shows the US as the highest spender with the worst outcomes. The UK is 11th out of twelve in expenditure, but it still has better outcomes for the money spent. Our outcomes, though, are worse in cancer survival than in any country except the US. Yet they want us to emulate the US system! The Government defers to the big US companies from whom advisers and senior posts are appointed. Simon Stevens, the previous boss of the NHS under the Conservatives, came from UnitedHealth.

The ICB gives the providers (mainly hospitals) about £2,500 per annum per head of population. The level of cuts demanded by NHSE and the Government is unacceptable and will cost lives, pain and suffering.

What we learned from the ICB meeting on May 29th 2025.

“On April 30th 2025 the ICB submitted a compliant plan which has resulted in both the ICB and every Cheshire and Merseyside Trust provider taking on additional cost improvement requirements (cuts to you and me, our edit) resulting in an aggregate deficit across the 16 NHS providers of c£228m, offset by a surplus for the ICB of £50m.

Whilst agreeing a plan was essential to securing the deficit support and cash to underpin this, our attention must turn now to the effective delivery of the plan and effectively mitigating the risks.”

Risks

On Page 507, the most critical risk was “Lack of Urgent and Emergency Care capacity and restricted flow across all sectors (primary care, community, mental health, acute hospitals and social care) results in patient harm and poor patient experience, currently rated as critical,” mentioned above.

Two other risks had the highest score of 25: Elective Care and financial duties (page 550).

The ICB receives an “allocation” of money from the Government. They then must distribute that money amongst the “Providers” (the hospitals, primary care, and other services) and pay for some aspects of social care, prescriptions, services outsourced to private contractors, and private sector financial advisers like Price Waterhouse Cooper.

The NHS staff work long hours for inadequate pay and deserve much better. We thank the NHS staff and will campaign to make the NHS a great place to work once more.

Not even the poorest celiac children will now get products on prescription.

Marie Antoinette comes to Liverpool in 2025

Professional people making cuts that will make the poorest of families struggle to feed their families still more difficult is always disgusting, but when they ignorantly suggest people can get their essential products (such as gluten-free products for celiacs) from food banks, then the blood boils. Coeliac is a serious illness, especially for children, if not tackled by avoiding gluten foods which are up till now available on prescription. No one will use a prescription if they have to pay for prescriptions, so it’s children and less well-off people who need this. Hear our response at about one hour 37 minutes in.

Why don’t they hit the rich with their cuts? The cuts that the ICB had a choice in were cruel. They coldly and deliberately made cuts that would hurt some of the poorest in our communities, cuts that would make a slight difference to the overall budget problems. The people of Cheshire and Merseyside deserve much better. Will our area’s people passively accept this or organise to gain proper funding and an open democratic organisation of our healthcare? We say organise!

They also cut the number of fertility treatment cycles available in Cheshire and Merseyside to one. On average, it takes more than one treatment to conceive. Of course, you can have more if you pay!

Provision for long COVID was sent back to the GPs.

The scheme to take gynaecology into the GPs’ practices has been defunded.

This system of cuts is facing the ICB for the foreseeable future unless we fight like our grandmothers and great-grandmothers fought for health care.

The “winter” crisis

Cheshire and Merseyside ICB do not have enough staffing or funding to stop the winter crisis continuing into summer and through next winter. Indeed, they are expected to make further cuts. The Royal College of Emergency Medicine recently published their estimate of the number of extra deaths caused by this situation last winter; “New analysis by the Royal College of Emergency Medicine reveals that there were more than 16,600 deaths associated with long A&E waits before admission in England last year”” That is an increase of 20% (2,725) compared to 2023.

These are the issues in the “Winter crisis”. Be clear, the staff work hard and we thank them for all they do, but we do not help if we keep silent and let an unacceptable situation continue:

Liverpool Echo Photo of Corridor care
  • Using temporary escalation spaces to accommodate patients (corridors or even bathrooms for you and me). This is when you are acutely ill.
  • Waiting on trollies, rather than beds, for many hours in corridors.
  • Waiting “Fit it to sit” those not so sick that they are put on trollies, or if trollies are not available, being treated in chairs.
  • Having no access to toilets, showers, or changes of clothes.
  • “Boarding-in” in wards. This is where patients are put in a ward not linked to their illness and not in one of the regular beds in this ward, so not within the normal staffing levels.
  • Long waits to be seen by a doctor in the A&E.
  • Long waits for a bed once the Doctors decide to admit a patient.
  • Long waits for social care once treatment has been completed in the hospital.
  • Ambulance response times are slowed by Ambulances being stuck queuing outside the hospital.
  • Last winter, the situation was grim, and Liverpool Hospitals A and E had to close its doors despite the following steps: In order to free up beds, the Liverpool hospitals paid for patients who no longer needed hospital treatment to go to care homes, which provided a higher level of care than the patient needed. Arrangements were made to divert some people to walk-in centres. The public responded by not using A&E unless their condition became too severe (this can cause problems later, as treating patients at the start of their illness, rather than waiting for it to progress, is the better option). The ICB reported a dramatic drop in low acuity (less ill) cases during the highest demand period. Northwest Ambulance put on extra staff.
    This is emergency planning being used routinely. Yet hospitals are expected to make cuts year on year.

All of this is unacceptable, and with resources, it is avoidable.

The original model of the NHS was a national public service, publicly owned and publicly delivered, providing the best available treatment for everyone. The NHS should return to being a fully publicly provided service. We should not pay big US and UK corporations that do not improve our healthcare but leech resources from it.

Ordinary women in 1916 fought to get good Maternity care. We can fight for it too

The Dark Side of American Health Insurance

Insurance is often proposed, most famously by right-wing parties, as a solution to the NHS’s recovery. Yet, the American healthcare system is roundly disliked by ordinary people in the USA. It also has the worst health system in the developed world, according to research conducted over many years by the American Commonwealth Fund.

We have lots of links to give more information, but the post can be read without following them.

In this blog post, we are focusing on the insurance aspect of US healthcare.

US Healthcare Insurance premiums alone cost about half of a starting salary to insure a family. (Many people pay insurance through their wages.)

Salaries in the USAIn ££   Cost of health insurance per year for a familySingle person health insurance family health private
insurance per month
Teacher
(starting salary)		$50,000£38,000$25,000$8,951$2,084
Bus driver
(starting salary)		$41,000£31,000 Approx$25,000$8,951$2,084

UK teachers start on £31,605 in 2025

The following are the most hated parts of that system:

Bankruptcy: Medical bills cause more bankruptcies than any other event.

Decide. The insurance company decides if you need the treatment, not you or your doctor.

Deductibles: This is the amount you have to pay before your insurance starts covering your costs. There are many payments patients have to make after they pay for the insurance premiums. “Deductibles are amounts patients pay before insurance starts covering expenses. Co-payments are fixed amounts paid for specific services, and co-insurance is a percentage of the cost the patient pays.” 

Co-pays: This is like an excess on your car insurance. It’s what you have to pay in addition to the insurance for each different incidence of illness or health protection event (check-ups etc.)

Denial. You can be denied care by your insurance.

Defend. The insurance companies fight you in court if you contest their decision. They have big legal teams and it can be cripplingly expensive fight them in court.

Debt. 100 million Americans have medical debt.

Die early. Americans die earlier than in other wealthy countries

Disrespect. Giving birth costs a fortune, and more women and babies die at birth than in the UK. “25% of all stillbirths in the US are preventable today.  47% of all stillbirths in the US at 37+ weeks are preventable today.” 

Fragmentation and complexity: There are many different kinds of health insurance, depending on how much you can pay. The more you pay, the better the service.

Medicines, even with insurance, cost too much, including essentials like  Insulin and EpiPens.

No Cover.Some people can’t afford insurance at all.These people pay for healthcare from their own savings if they have any, from go fund me appeals, charity or go without.

Waste. Healthcare costs the US government twice as much per person as the NHS costs in the UK, despite insurance, yet it has worse outcomes for patients.

The system makes billions for the big corporations and is designed for profit.

AI, artificial intelligence data is used by insurers to say when patients should be discharged, causing real hardship.

The average cost of childbirth in the USA in 2020 was  $13,383, with patients paying about $2,300 out of pocket in addition to the insurance

  •  Infant mortality in the US is a disgrace. The UK isn’t even in the top ten, but the US is worse again.”America’s infant mortality rate of six [per 1,000 live births] is nearly 70 per cent higher than the average rate of about three for the European Union countries. And a baby born in the United States is nearly three times as likely to die during their first year of life as a baby born in Iceland, Japan or Sweden“
  • 2022 Infant Mortality Rate: 5.547 deaths per 1,000 live births. 
  • 2022 Maternal Mortality Rate: 22 deaths per 100,000 live births. 
  • Factors contributing to higher rates: The US has higher rates of infant mortality compared to other developed countries, with factors such as racial disparities and lack of access to healthcare.

The complexity of the US system is staggering and difficult for people to navigate. Healthcare calculations take a lot of people’s time and effort. This quote from a report to Congress shows some of the complexity.

“Private health insurance is the predominant source of health insurance coverage in the United States and includes both group coverage (largely made up of employer-sponsored insurance) and direct-purchase coverage (which includes plans directly purchased from an insurer, both on the health insurance exchanges and outside of them). In 2023, an estimated 180 million individuals (54.7% of the U.S. population) and 46 million individuals (13.9% of the U.S population)were covered by group coverage and direct purchase coverage, respectively.

On top of the price paid by  ordinary people in the USA, the government then spends twice as much per person on healthcare as the UK government spends, so insurance is no answer to  those  who say, “We can’t afford the NHS”.

In 2023, the seven big for-profit U.S. health insurers’ revenues reached $1.39 trillion, with profits totalling $70 billion.Health insurance is run to make profit not provide care. The profits are enormous. United  Health reported net earnings of $420 billion per year.

The US system costs the US government more per person than the NHS costs the UK government, even though ordinary people pay a lot for their healthcare.

  • The federal government spent $1.9 trillion on health care programs and services in fiscal year (FY) 2024, 27% of all federal outlays in that year, and collectively the largest category of federal spending.
  • Forgone tax revenues to the federal government resulting from tax subsidies for employer-sponsored insurance coverage (ESI) and a portion of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) premium tax credits, together totalled $398 billion in FY 2024.
  • Over 80% of all federal support for health programs and services, including spending and tax subsidies, goes to programs that provide or subsidize health insurance coverage, with 36% going to Medicare, 25% going to Medicaid and CHIP, 17% going to employment-based health coverage, and 5% going to subsidies for Affordable Care Act (ACA) coverage.
  • In 2023, U.S. citizens collectively spent $4.9 trillion on healthcare, which is equivalent to $14,570 per person. Some of this money will be paid for patient care, some for profits, and 85% will be held in trust and invested by the insurance companies, which gives them even more financial clout than their published profits indicate .

Many in the USA call for a single-payer system. “Single-payer” describes the mechanism by which healthcare is paid for by a single public authority, not a private authority, nor a mix of both. In the USA, this would mean that the government paid everyone’s premiums, and it would be an improvement, but it is not the same as the NHS, which is more than a single-payer system.

The NHS, as it was founded, is much more than a single-payer system. The government, acting on behalf of all of us, pays for healthcare and provides it through a coordinated and integrated national system of hospitals, general practitioners (GPS), and primary care. Social care was once part of Government provision, but it was privatised under Thatcher.

From the Good Law Project

The same huge corporations that have inflicicted this damage on the health and well being of people of the United States, have been invited into the NHS including those who have been penalised in the US for their behaviours.

“Centene began moving into the UK healthcare sector in 2017. In 2020 it acquired Circle Health and later AT Medics becoming the largest private provider of UK GP surgeries.

Corporate Watch uncovered that Centene and its subsidiaries have received at least £970 million in NHS contracts since 2013; £346m of this was part of a £1.57 billion COVID contract issued in 2020.

In the US, Centene is in the top ten companies with the highest penalties for government contract related offences, having paid over $1 billion dollars in fines for filing false claims.

This old cartoon from the very founding of the NHS shows that the original ideas are very strong.

The miners who organised their own health service in some of the mining towns, the women’s organisations like the Cooperative Women’s Guild, and the socialist doctors in the 1930s who fought for health care for women and babies, all built the campaign for the NHS. It was Nye bevan who as the minister in the 1945 Government brought it into being and sustained it in its early years. It is well worth reading Bevan’s own thoughts on this matter reproduced here courtesy of Public Matters.

NHS was founded to provide:

Healthcare for all, free at the point of need (the previous government changed it to be no longer free for migrants).

A comprehensive, well coordinated national service (but the ICB system breaks that up).

Publicly provided, not for profit (Lots of profits are being taken now).

Education and long-term plans for the workforce (well, it did so some time ago, now, workforce issues are chaotic).

National terms and conditions of employment (unless it’s outsourced or in-sourced).

Focus on preventative medicine and public health. Public health has been cut by 26% since 2015/16, yet in this time of climate and environment crises, pandemic and, gross poverty and poor housing we need it more than ever.

Bevan said, “The essence of a satisfactory health service is that the rich and the poor are treated alike, that poverty is not a disability, and wealth is not an advantage.”

This national system has been damaged by recent governments and is still being damaged by the current one. It has been damaged by bringing in huge for-profit corporations and small-scale privatisations, and by massive cuts and underfunding and understaffing. That’s why we are fighting to restore and repair the NHS. The campaigners decades ago succeeded in establishing the NHS. If we build a big enough movement, we can do the same again; no-one else will do it for us.

At the Save Liverpool Women’s Hospital demonstration in 2023

Defend Our NHS writes”The biggest US health insurance outfit is the notorious United Health of Minneapolis[i]. Simon Stevens, a previous vice-president of this monster (now with a seat in the House of Lords), designed and introduced the destructive ICS changes with the connivance of Jeremy Hunt and without parliamentary approval“

Wes Streeting has made Samantha Jones, (a key member of the American health privatisers’ boss class), the head of the Department of Health and Social Care. Under Streeting, the NHS has told the different Integrated Care Boards to hand over the foundations of our health information to Palantir and Peter Thiel, a Trump “controller“.

We want to restore and repair the NHS on its founding principles. In that form, it was the best in the world. Cuts and austerity have severely damaged the NHS, but it is still better than the US insurance system. We need to go back to Bevan. Our campaigns fight to Restore and Repair the NHS. Please join us.

Runcorn: Repair and Restore the NHS.
Picture Credit Steve Wright Flickr

Repair and Restore the NHS for Runcorn, Frodsham, Helsby, Elton and Guilden Sutton. (This is NHS campaigners’ contribution to the debate in the Runcorn By-election and wil be upated during the campaign).

The Runcorn By-election comes at a time of anger over the state of public services including health and education, anger at the Government leaving the NHS with inadequate resouces and thereby causing deaths and making cuts at the expense of the poorest in society and those who literally need most help.

Keep our NHS Public expresses the anger (here) of most who campaign to restore and repair the NHS.

We are calling for a movement to demand the restoration and repair of the NHS. Privatisation has been a disaster for patients, staff, and the government’s spending. (Privatisation, in this sense, is the NHS paying for-profit companies to do medical work that the NHS previously provided.It’s not just charging patients)

We want, and demand this, of all the parties.

A fully funded national NHS, a fully staffed NHS, maternity care that respects and keeps women and babies safe, with no more hospital closures, a full GP service, dentistry for everyone, healthcare that manages winter well without corridor care and “boarding in“, mental health care brought back into the NHS. We want an NHS that is a good place to work. We need a good universal social care system. We want rid of privatisation and want a retun to the orginal model of the NHS without the big corporations.

Good healthcare is an excellent investment in the nation, repaying the cost in health, wealth and happiness, and financially with at least £3 return for each £1 invested. Even the world bank says “Investing in a country’s healthcare system is a strategic move that yields significant economic and social benefits, fostering a healthier, more productive workforce and contributing to overall national development and prosperity.”

The NHS was founded in July 1948 to be a national universal public service, providing the best available health care to all UK people. It was not designed to make money for big health corporations but to improve the health of the people, which it did for decades.

This model of healthcare once made the NHS the best health service in the world, in 2014 and in 2017.

The NHS was far more economical and effective than the US model.The ICB’s brought in in 2022 Act are modelled on the US Accountable Care Organisations.

The US model of healthcare is unacceptable; never mind what right wing parties say.

“The average annual health insurance premiums in 2024 are $8,951 for single coverage and $25,572 for family coverage. The average single coverage premium increased 6% in 2024 while the average family premium increased 7%. The average family premium has increased 24% since 2019 and 52% since 2014“.

In additon to what people in the USA pay for insurance and the many co-pays, the US government pays more per head of population than the UK does, with far worse outcomes, particularly for women and babies. Yet the US health corporations are influential in the semi-privatised NHS.

Over the last  15 years, this service has been damaged by  

  • Real-terms funding cuts,
  • privatisation,
  • enforced competition between hospital trusts,
  • damaging legislation (in 2012 and 2022), and reorganisation on the US model, all the time the governments are “advised” by big health corporations that preside over the worst healthcare in the advanced world in the USA.
  • The increasing poverty and ill health of the people.
  • The fabric of the hospital buildings has been neglected and we saw broken promises of new build hospitals.
  • Cuts in the number of  hospital beds
  • Poor workforce planning so we have fewer doctors per head of population than other advanced countries, yet we have unemployed GPs and hundreds of doctors facing unemployment in August.
  • Outsourcing of services,  
  • Services such as NHS dentistry are disappearing from many areas, and complex audiology is in severe trouble.
  • Commissioning medical services from private companies. 

We have 6.24 million individual patients waiting to be treated, yet doctors are out of work, there is corridor care in A & E, locally we have the longest waits for admission to a ward in the country after being admitted through the A&E, and long ambulance waiting times. All this with staff overworked and underpaid. Billions are paid to outsourced for profit providers especially in mental health  

We can win back the NHS

The NHS came from the people. They fought long and hard for it. From the miners of Tredegar, to the Women’s Cooperative Guild and many more, the fight for universal health care, was a long struggle. We must fight to win it back. Working class women played a big role in demanding healthcare and won some clinics but the demand was for care for everyone, from before birth to the grave and they did not stop till they won that health care. Our healthcare was never given to us by the rich. We had to fight for it.

Britain had appalling health care before World War 2. Trade Unions, especially in the mining towns, fought for healthcare for all in their areas. In some areas men were covered by workplace insurance (the panel), but not women or children. Even if a woman was employed and covered by insurance, maternity care was not included. The number of babies dying at birth was appalling, and women were more likely to die in childbirth than miners to die down the pit. Women’s groups fought for the right to health care for babies and women.

 On 5th July 1948, the NHS was founded and people could see the doctor even if they had no money; there was universal access to healthcare for the first time in the UK. The health of the nation, especially children and women giving birth, improved steadily until the governments brought in austerity.

This cartoon Charley your very good health, from the founding of the NHS is interesting even today.

Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0). Source: Wellcome Collection.

The National  Health Service linked all the different kinds of treatments, all the hospitals, all the  GPs and clinics into a single organisation that allowed information and research to be shared freely.

 Cheshire and Merseyside NHS coordinated campaigns are formed by Keep Our NHS Public, Defend Our NHS, Save Liverpool Women’s Hospital, local Trade Union Councils and some union branches. We call on the government to ditch their pro-privatisation policies, to fund the NHS to European levels,and to move legislation to reinstate the fully public NHS.

 Please tell candidates you want to see the NHS restored and repaired. We saw the damage the conservatives did.  Reform’s leader has called for an insurance model for years, and the new government has failed miserably in averting the terrible winter crisis and the Maternity crises.

Save Liverpool Women’s Hospital: A Call to Action

We want to save Liverpool Women’s Hospital. We ask for your help in saving it. We call on the tradition of women struggling for our rights for our families and our communities. We have seen how women can mobilise and make their voices heard. We call on men to support us.

( This blog post has many links as evidence, but the reader does not need to read each to understand the post.)

The Cheshire and Merseyside ICB (the body that currently controls the NHS in Cheshire and Merseyside) has published its report on the engagement process for the future of Liverpool Women’s Hospital. This report has no proposals but says further work will be done. The report does not accurately reflect what we saw happen in the engagement meetings nor the number of responses we know went into the engagement from those who want to keep  Liverpool Women’s Hospital,  nor does it adequately recognise our 77,000 petition signatures, giving it just a passing mention, nor does it recognise our detailed and referenced response. It ignores public meetings hosted by MPS. It’s as though this campaign doesn’t exist, as though no one has objected. We will post a detailed reply shortly.

Meanwhile, the severe issues with our NHS and the Maternity service continue. Austerity continues and continues to cost the lives of women and babies. The Labour Government is continuing with Austerity and cuts. It is not repairing the NHS, but rather further embedding US for-profit health companies and data companies, like Palantir, into the service.

Whisper, chat, or shout about it – whichever way – we need to talk about the NHS. Our NHS is underfunded and understaffed, and its wealth is diverted to private profit by decision, not by accident. Women and babies are at risk. Gynaecology services are inadequate. The UK has the second-highest maternal death rate among eight major European nations, with only Slovakia performing worse, according to an analysis published in the BMJ last year.

This blog focuses on women’s health, Maternity, and children’s health and well-being, and, because it’s unavoidable, the situation in Accident and Emergency services. There are many other areas of concern about what’s happening in the different parts of the NHS. All these issues touch on and affect each other. Stand up and speak out for the NHS. We send solidarity to all the NHS campaign groups.

Understaffing is caused by underfunding and unnecessary pressures at work, leading to staff resigning and even leaving the profession. In 2024, despite staff shortages, hospitals were expected to make 6% cuts. (CIPS). Liverpool Women’s Hospital has had too little funding for over a decade. There have been times when the Care Quality Commission have criticised the hospital. In 2023, the CQC said, “Not all staff felt respected, supported, and valued. However, they remained focused on the needs of patients receiving care. Some staff had raised concerns several times regarding safety and staffing directly to senior leaders; however, they saw no quick action or improvement. The CQC also said that “the trust must ensure they deploy sufficient, suitably qualified midwifery staff across all areas of the service. Regulation 18 (1).” The latest CQC report is much better. The rating is now good. We have been told that Liverpool Women’s is now fully staffed with midwives. We will follow up on this with the hospital to see how this tallies with the Channel 4 report on staffing.

Young women have mobilised in the past and will mobilise again.

We want the Maternity, Gynaecology, fertility, genetics and neonatal services to remain as a whole with the full team at Crown Street.

We want enough funding and staffing to improve the experience of birth and treatment at the hospital for women, babies, and staff. Seventy-seven thousand people have signed our petition, on paper and online. The petition is still growing. We campaign for improved Maternity services across the country. We say that Birthrate+ is not enough. We demand much better NHS staffing, especially in midwifery and neonatal care. Channel 4 has revealed the state of nurse and midwife staffing in the NHS and LS; staff are diverted for daily emergencies, breaking the minimum even within tight essential staffing levels.

The national picture for Maternity is cause for serious concern and should be cause for action from any serious politician, any concerned woman. The BMJ said, “The number of women dying in the UK during or soon after pregnancy has increased to levels not seen since 2003-05, latest figures show“

MBRRACE reported in 2024, “There was a statistically significant increase in the overall maternal death rate in the UK between 2017-19 and 2020-22. This increase remained statistically significant when deaths due to COVID-19 were excluded, which suggests a concerning trend independent of COVID-19 specific deaths.“

In 2020-22 there were 13.41 deaths in every 100 000 maternities,1 significantly higher than the maternal death rate of 8.79 deaths per 100 000 in 2017-19 and similar to 2003-05 (13.95 per 100 000). The CQC inspected all the Maternity services across the country.

“The safety of Maternity services remains a key concern, with no services inspected as part of our inspection programme rated as outstanding for being safe. Almost half (47%) were rated as requires improvement for the safe key question, while 35% were rated as good and 18% were rated as inadequate. Where we had the most concerns, we used our enforcement powers to require trusts to make significant improvements to protect people from risk of harm.

Channel 4 figures show that while the Liverpool Royal is short of 4% of nurses in all wards and 17% in Critical Care, Liverpool Women’s is short of 20%, which is equivalent to being short one nurse in every five. and 17% of midwives. Aintree is short 18% of nurses and 10% in critical care. Alder Hey Hospital is short 30% of neonatal nurses. The trust must ensure that it deploys sufficient, suitably qualified midwifery staff across all areas of the service.
Regulation 18 (1)

As members of the public, campaigners attended board meetings and have never seen this staffing problem made clear in the papers. However, until the merger with the Royal Aintree and Broadgreen, fill rates for the different wards were reported in the board papers. This item of reporting must be reinstated in the new board papers. We have been told that Liverpool Women’s is fully staffed with midwives. We will follow up with the hospital.

The meeting about the hospital’s future.

The process underway to decide what happens to Maternity, Gynaecology, Neonatal services, fertility and genetics in Liverpool formally started in 2024 with “engagement” with the public. When the NHS makes significant changes to NHS services, the Integrated Care Board ( the current decision makers for the NHS in Cheshire and Merseyside) have to go through an engagement process, which they have done, then report on the engagement process and get permission from the board to proceed to put their plans to the public in a Consultation process. This engagement report will be received at the next ICB. The next ICB meeting is due to happen on March 27th, 2025, at the Events Hall, The Heath Business and Technical Park, Runcorn, WA7 4QX, from 9 am. The first half hour is to answer public questions.

This meeting with Ian Byrne MP voted 100% to save Liverpool Women’s Hospital.

Women and Children

Let’s build a movement to defend and improve Maternity services, fertility services, control over our fertility, and demand better healthcare for women.

Why? In the 20th century, women fought long and hard for safety in giving birth for mothers and babies, but now things are going backwards. Maternity units have been closed, and are being closed. There is a severe shortage of midwives, and no effective workforce plan is in place to address the problem. There are thousands of women out there who have midwifery training and have given up, either too broke, too tired, too fed up or outraged at the conditions for the women they care for. Both Infant and maternal mortality have risen significantly during Austerity, while governments have been cutting services, starving the NHS of vital resources and letting poverty soar. But never mind the women and kids; the rich have been doing very well.

Build a movement demanding better health and healthcare for our children, whose health is suffering.

“the rise in infant mortality means that UK is now ranked 30 out of 49 OECD countries – well behind other European countries except Bulgaria, Romania and Slovakia.”

Research shows that about 4-5% of women develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after giving birth – equivalent to approximately 25,000-30,000 women every year in the UK. Studies have also found that a much larger number of women – as many as one in three – find some aspects of their birth experience traumatic.

“Investing in the early years is one of the most important things we can do as a society to build a better future and promote the nation’s health, well-being and prosperity. There is clear evidence that such investment will be cost-effective in enabling future adults to live long and productive lives.” 

People Power can save the NHS if we make the politicians listen. Things start to change when ordinary people make time to speak to each other, including their unions, workmates and colleagues, other mothers at the school gates, families, their organisations, clubs, and elected representatives. Women have fought back since the Suffragettes, the Match Girls, the women of Fords in Speke, when they fought for equal pay, since the fight for abortion rights, and the many, many times women have fought for good Maternity care.

Myth Buster: plans for Liverpool Women’s Hospital 2025

Save Liverpool Women’s Hospital. Myth Busters Spring 2025

Myth 1. “There is no threat to Liverpool Women’s Hospital.”

Evidence of the threat.

When the ICB (the lead organisation in the NHS in Cheshire and Merseyside ) was formed, the future of Liverpool Women’s Hospital was one of its first pieces of work (see page 18.) It commissioned private consultancy  Carnal Farrar to create a report. This report went to the ICB in January 2023. The action from this report was to enter the first stage of engaging with the public about the hospital’s future. Their case for change can be seen here. https://www.cheshireandmerseyside.nhs.uk/media/so2bbinw/case-for-change-nhs-cm-eo-mtg-091024-presentation.pdf. The report and the engagement were expensive.

 Myth 2

“There will be a new building  for Liverpool Women’s Hospital at Liverpool Royal.”

Contrary evidence

There is no new building planned. Many urgently needed hospital building projects have been postponed for years. The current plans for the area to be cleared by demolition is earmarked for an Academic Health Sciences  Campus from the University of Liverpool.

liverpool.ac.uk/health-innovation-liverpool/academic-health-sciences-campus/#:~:text=A%20catalyst%20for%20innovation%20in,into%20real-world%20health%20solutions.

“The new plans for the last wave of identified new hospital building schemes in wave 3 are expected to begin construction between 2035 and 2039. There are no identified and accepted plans for a new Liverpool Women’s Hospital, so if one were agreed on current policies, it would not arrive before the 2040s.

Leeds Children’s Hospital closed, and services were dispersed to five different hospitals on the promise of a new hospital. That was then downgraded to a wing of a new hospital and now has no promise at all. That new build has not happened and isn’t in the new list of hospitals to be built.

Let’s be aware of that example and save what we have: a good building that is nearly 30 years old on a good site with a good team.

Myth 3

“Liverpool Women’s Hospital will move to Liverpool Royal Hospital.”

There is no room in the Royal for 7,000 babies and 50,000 gynaecology and other appointments.

There is no room for the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit ( NICU).

“At Liverpool Women’s Hospital, each year we deliver approximately 7,500 babies, carry out around 50,000 gynaecological inpatient and outpatient procedures, care for over 1,000 poorly and premature newborns, perform around 1,000 IVF cycles, and conduct over 4,000  genetic appointments.

If there is room at the Royal and other sections of the Liverpool University Hospitals’ Group, why on earth was corridor care so bad each of the last winters?

Myth 4

The hospital is dangerous.

There is no evidence of these “dangers” in recent Care Quality Commission reports nor in serious incidents reported in board papers related directly to the need for transfers. There were problems, hopefully now resolved, about overnight consultant presence, the need for better access to blood products, and the need for a medical team aimed at deteriorating patients. There are ongoing problems with delayed induction of labour, as there are in other hospitals. This is caused by poor levels of staffing and inadequate workforce planning nationally. It also reflects the increase in C-sections

The hospital recently passed all requirements for the  Maternity Incentive Scheme. Those hospitals which pass all 10 safety requirements get a refund of some of the premiums they pay for this service. Liverpool Women’s Hospital is one of the few who get this refund.

The Maternity service in the UK is underfunded, understaffed and in trouble. 

The many scandals have not been attributed to “isolated” sites, but women travelling for hours to get to a Maternity hospital have caused problems. Hospital boards not giving due care to Maternity has been an issue nationally in these historic and ongoing problems.

There have been problems at Liverpool Women’s Hospital with understaffing on the Maternity ward in the past, but not related to “isolation” but to the gross underfunding of Maternity nationally. Being the largest Maternity provider, this underfunding hits Liverpool Women’s Hospital extremely hard.

In the March 2025 board papers on page 107 they report “Risk that the Trust cannot achieve long term financial sustainability and therefore resulting in the inability to continue activities of the Trust and deliver organisational strategy, due to: Inability to address underlying causes of structural deficit (isolated site, economies of scale, Maternity tariff). Risk that the national approach to contracting, tariff, and productivity through the 25/26 planning round will have an adverse impact on the Trust’s plan

Myth 5

“The Liverpool Women’s is uniquely  dangerous because women are sometimes transferred in or out of the hospital to or from other hospitals.”

Response. Liverpool Women’s Hospital is a mile down a straight road to Liverpool Royal. Hospital transfers are often unpleasant but the safest option. Transfers should be minimised but will never be totally avoided. Approximately 20,00 -25,000 critical care transfers are performed within the NHS each year. It seems obvious that hospitals should work cooperatively and plan to minimise hospital transfers. However, the 2012 Health and Care Act and the Trust system made each hospital a separate entity, expected to compete. Those laws have changed, partly because the pandemic forced cooperation.

 Myth 6

“The Liverpool Women’s lacks an Intensive care unit.”

Answer

Liverpool Women’s Hospital has level 2  intensive care. / According to the engagement meetings, there is insufficient demand at Liverpool Women’s to have a full level 3 unit, so women are transferred to the Royal, Aintree, or, if they are full, to another hospital.

 Myth 7

“There are no published plans to close Liverpool Women’s Hospital.”

Accurate; no published plans, however

There are no “Plans” as such. However, throughout the “engagement”, the ICB spokespersons said that Obstetrics and Gynaecology must be co-located with an acute hospital. The case for change is made without any actual alternatives presented. The purpose of the exercise is to convince people that change is needed. They said at the Engagement meetings that the NHS will still use the Crown Street site but not necessarily for Maternity and women’s health. The actual plans will appear when the ICB accepts their Engagement Report. Plans are to be published according to the timetable presented at the ICB.

However, the Liverpool Women’s Hospital Trust  Board no longer meets. It has given its powers to the Liverpool  University Hospitals Group, a major step towards a merger. To our knowledge, no one on the  Liverpool University Hospitals Group Board has qualifications and experience in Maternity or Obstetrics. It was the neglect of Obstetrics and Maternity care by the board at Shrewsbury which was fundamental to the Shrewsbury baby deaths.

What does the Save Liverpool Women’s Hospital Campaign want?

Women having babies have the right to excellent antenatal care. When giving birth, we need to keep our own agency, we need calm, and we need a good place to give birth, with well-rested, professionally qualified staff available to be with us to help in a timely fashion. Women and babies have a right to good restful care immediately after giving birth, with expert help in infant feeding and support with concerns. Mother and baby need speedy access to support in the early weeks and months.

That is good Maternity care. That is what we fight for.

Women’s health needs to be given fair treatment. The waiting lists for gynaecology treatment were the subject of a parliamentary report, which described the situation as medical misogyny. We think it is better described as political misogyny. The politicians decided that their cuts were more important than our health. Report after report has described the crisis in Maternity, like the report that described medical misogyny, and that on Birth Trauma were produced in Parliament. The politicians know, or should know if they read their own reports, what is happening. The restructuring of our health care on the US model is ongoing and must be resisted.

Spring brings new life to the fight for Liverpool Women’s Hospital

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

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

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

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

Only the very best for our babies, no ifs no buts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bread and Roses
This was our 2023 International women’s day poster, and still a favourite at at our stall.

February update on the plans for Liverpool Women’s Hospital.

The ICB, the lead body for the NHS in Cheshire and Merseyside, began a process towards significant change for Liverpool Women’s Hospital last year. It was formally announced in the autumn, and action got underway in October and November, with what they called an Engagement exercise. Their latest meeting was on January 30th. You can find all the papers we quote from the meeting here. There is also a long video.

Many people cannot understand how anyone could tamper with Liverpool Women’s Hospital. Some simply don’t believe that it is happening. We want to ensure that people can check what we post about the ICB against their own material. Quotes from their papers will be in blue.

There is no money for a significant improvement, let alone a new build, or for alteration of buildings in the existing hospitals. There is famously no room at the Royal, and given the winter crisis with trolley care at Aintree, no room there either. Any other site would be further away from the highest levels of intensive care than the current Liverpool Women’s Hospital site on Crown Street.

It is not possible to separate the fight for better Maternity care, better outcomes for babies, and better gynaecology and fertility care, from the overall privatisation, Americanisation, underfunding, understaffing and neglect of buildings in the NHS. Our campaign is part of a national fight back to Restore and Repair the NHS.

Leeds campaigners out in force.

What happened at the ICB meeting in January? During the “engagement” process in the autumn, the ICB presenters of their Case for Change stressed repeatedly that they wanted women’s services colocated in an acute general hospital, but that they did not yet have a plan as to how this would happen, or where our babies would be born. They insisted the Crown Street site did not meet national regulations. We have challenged this in detail here.

The issue of the future of Liverpool Women’s Hospital is managed by the ICB’s Women’s Hospital Services in Liverpool Committee.

The Steps which are already taken towards their Case for Change.

Liverpool Women’s Hospital management was moved into a group with the Royal, Aintree, and Broadgreen, which was agreed upon at the ICB. How such a crucial change can happen without public consultation baffles us. We can find no legislation that permits this, but we will continue to look. There was legislation about the reorganisation of hospitals into Trusts. Trusts still legally exist, but they have delegated their powers over finance and staffing to the Group in Liverpool.

“Liverpool Clinical Services Review – Liverpool University Hospitals Foundation Trust and Liverpool Women’s FT come together as University Hospitals of Liverpool Group from November 1st. This will streamline decision-making and develop further collaboration opportunities in terms of service quality, access, workforce capacity and finance. Plans for other acute and specialist trusts to join a group structure, retaining their status as separate Trusts, are in development. “

Plans for the future of Liverpool Women’s Hospital are discussed at a subcommittee held in private, and their reports then come to the meeting held in public. At January’s meeting, it was reported that;

Phase 2 Programme Plan The next stage summary programme plan – from January – December 2025 – was presented to the Committee. The plan set out the timescales and milestones for agreeing the model of care, managing the options appraisal process and developing any business cases. The Committee approved the phase 2 programme plan.

and

Women’s services in Liverpool programme case for change approved by ICB board and formal public engagement started on October 15th. In parallel work will begin on the design phase and development of a clinical model at a Clinical Reference group meeting in December 2024. A Lived Experience Panel has been established to support the programme.

The  (sub-committee) considered the following at its meeting in November 2024: Programme Update. This included: • Finalising the case for change and briefing councils and MPs prior to publication. • Planning and delivering the public engagement for the case for change. • Progress on delivering clinical improvements at LWFT. • Refreshing the counterfactual case. • Planning for the clinical engagement event in December.

“design phase and development of a clinical model” This phrase presumably is when they will decide where our babies will be born and where Gyny and the NICU will be based.

The report on the engagement meetings did not reflect the experience of many people who attended them. Before writin g this we checked with a dozen people who attended. Our campaign told people about these poorly advertised meetings, and we were the majority of the (few) people who attended. The in-person meetings were held during the day when people at work could not participate. There was only one evening meeting. We objected to how notes were kept at these meetings and that there was no recording. The overall response from the public was ‘NO!’ to their case for change. The report given at the ICB meeting said:

Communications and Engagement Update
The Committee received feedback on the 6 week public engagement period which completed the day before the meeting.

The engagement process and products included face-to-face and online engagement events, a dedicated website, and a public facing version of the case for change (including an easy read version). Voluntary sector organisations were also commissioned to support the engagement with harder to reach groups and communities.

Feedback on the case for change was collected via a questionnaire (online, printed, and available in an easy-to-read format). This was also translated into 16 languages. An independent organisation, Hood and Woolf, has been commissioned to complete the analysis of the questionnaires; the Committee will receive the report of the analysis at its next meeting.

The engagement events proved to be challenging, with some individuals dominating the sessions. More resources are likely to be needed for effective engagement activities in the future to ensure all attendees can have a voice.

The plan for where the women’s services will go is not ready, and they don’t have the money for buildings or to fund significant change, but they intend to continue even in these circumstances.

Quotes about the finance for the Case for Change

“The C&M system is already financially challenged, and therefore the risk score reflects that new expenditure and investment may not be possible in the current financial climate; this is as much about the wider availability of public sector capital as the C&M situation“

and in more detail here

WSC3 – Failure to secure the required financial resources for the transformation of women’s hospital services in Liverpool, combined with revenue implications, will negatively impact on the successful delivery of proposals, currently rated as extreme (16). The C&M system is already financially challenged and therefore the risk score reflects that new expenditure and investment may not be possible in the current financial climate; this is as much about the wider availability of public sector capital as the C&M situation. A Finance and Estates Group is due to be established in January 2025 (as part of the emerging Programme governance and reporting arrangements). Further actions include baseline mapping to support the design phase and finance and estates modelling to support the options development – the latter action has a longer-term timescale of January – June 2025.

Date of next meeting: the Women’s Hospital Services in Liverpool Committee March 19th 2025

After the public meeting chaired by Kim Johnson MP on January 31st, with more people (around 100) in attendance than in the whole of the ICB “engagement” events in the autumn, we have been invited to a citizen’s assembly to be chaired by Ian Byrne MP for West Derby.

Other vital issues were discussed at the ICB meeting in January, including finance and the winter crisis. We will report on these in another blog post.

There is a lobby of parliament about the NHS. If you could go, please get in touch.

What does the Campaign to Save Liverpool Women’s Hospital want?

This is what we fight for!

Women having babies have the right to excellent antenatal care.

When giving birth, we need to keep our own agency, we need calm, and we need a good place to give birth, with well-rested, well-qualified staff available to be with us to help in a timely fashion.

Women and babies have a right to good restful care immediately after giving birth, with expert help in infant feeding and support with concerns. Mother and baby need speedy access to support in the early weeks and months in issues to do with physical and mental health.

That’s good Maternity care.

Next steps to Save Liverpool Women’s Hospital

We are planning a ‘Human Billboard’ – bring your own poster if you can -event outside Liverpool Women’s Hospital on March 8th at noon. Save the date.

We can do it!

We are collecting your stories about your experience with Liverpool Women’s Hospital. Please do get in touch.

We will be planning other public meetings around the city, holding stalls and leafletting events. We will continue to follow the meetings both at the ICB and at the Hospital Group.

Please invite us to any meetings you might be organising in the community, in your union or political party.

We need your help, and we need the money to pay for all of this. Please donate through Paypal or send cheques to Save Liverpool Women’s Hospital Campaign c/o News from Nowhere 96 Bold Street Liverpool l1 4HY

https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=SVSL9LVZYJQ32

Happy Valentine’s Day to the NHS staff who do such wonderful work

This is link to the recoding of the public meeting  chaired by Kim Johnson on 31st January

https://www.unionsafety.eu/docs/HSNewsItems%202025/February/SaveLiverpoolWomensHospitalCampaignGroupContinuesIts10YearFightAgainstClosureOfEnglandsOnlyDedicatedMaternityHospital.html