“Do not appeal, do not beg, do not grovel. Take courage, join hands, stand beside us, fight with us”!

The Suffragettes knew how to campaign and so do we.

This post is being written just two weeks after the General Election which saw the Conservatives, who had so very severely damaged our healthcare, thrown out. (Hurray!)The new Labour Government has a massive majority but lacks a clear plan to restore and repair the NHS, and talks of more privatisation. They also have form in bringing in privatisation in earlier governments. So, we need to review the situation and renew our campaign.

We are far from alone. There are campaigns like ours dotted around the country. The NHS is immensely important to people in the UK.

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

We fight too for the whole NHS; the issues are inseparable. Maternity is one of many issues, including the overall reduction in healthcare capacity in this country as seen in the many hospital closures, shortage of doctors, multiple kinds of privatisation, the use of the business model, and the influence of big US “health” corporations. We, though, focus on maternity and our local issues (as well as the big national and international healthcare, women’s rights and children’s rights issues.)

From the start we said

For all our mothers, sisters, daughters, friends, lovers and every precious baby save Liverpool Women’s Hospital and the NHS.

In the years we have been campaigning we have seen severe damage to maternity care nationally, and to the whole NHS. Mothers and precious babies have paid a heavy price. Highly qualified people have conducted report after report into the situation and the last government gave lip service and let the situation deteriorate. These are heartbreaking and infuriating descriptions of some maternity in the UK.

The recent All Parliamentary report on Birth Trauma has been followed by the Birth Trauma report from Beth Hopper and the Keep Horton General Hospital campaign.

The most useful definition of birth trauma we have found is this.

“A traumatic childbirth experience refers to a woman’s experience of interactions and/or events directly related to childbirth that caused overwhelming distressing emotions and reactions; leading to short and/ or long-term negative impacts on a woman’s health and wellbeing.”

There is support in issues around Birth if you contact the Birth Trauma Association, and sometimes through the maternity hospital. Liverpool Women’s Hospital has a service called the Rainbow Clinic for women having a baby after an earlier traumatic experience, normally involving the death of a baby but it is not advertised on their website.

Some mothers thankfully do have great experiences of birth but the numbers reporting far from good experiences is heartbreaking. The racial and class divides in Maternity outcomes are scandalous. Maternity is grossly underfunded and understaffed. The staff are overworked.

Continuity of Carer where pregnant women are cared for by a known small team of midwives from the pregnancy through birth and the post-natal period would help if it were fully staffed and funded would help. Without funding and staffing, the attempt to introduce continuity of care caused chaos. Donna Ockendon’s report called for it to be halted until full funding and resources.

We are concerned about women’s experience of delayed induction of labour and its link to emergency caesarean sections.

Staff in our hospitals and community teams work hard with inadequate resources and inadequate staffing. We will shout from the rooftops”We need more midwives.”

We have seen NHS managers looking for all kinds of magical thinking solutions to the problem but Liverpool Women’s Hospital does not need a new building, we do not need new fashions in childbirth, we need women’s choices to be heeded, we need more midwives, more obstetricians, more anaesthetists, more natal nurses, more health visitors, more infant feeding specialists. We need better blood services, well-maintained buildings, better food for staff at night, we need bursaries and we need to retain the staff we have. Above all, we need more midwives.

It would be nice if NHS managers were prepared to speak truth to power but we know that bullying is endemic in the NHS.

Many reports, especially in the right-wing press criticise “NHS Maternity Care”. However, the US model of maternity care is the worst in the developed world so no lectures from American Health Corporations or their UK offshoots or employees or political servants, please.

We must make the politicians listen. Our campaign must become deafening.

We took a big Restore and Repair the NHS campaign van around Cheshire and Merseyside in the week before the election. We went to Leighton Hospital near Crewe and up to Southport, to Ellesmere Port, to Chester, to Neston, to Warrington, to Kirkby, Whiston, Birkenhead, West Kirby and Liverpool. The van was met by campaigners in many places and had good support from the public. We heard stories of gratitude to the NHS and stories of long waits and being unable to access treatment.

We were not supporting a particular political party but we were opposing the last government and all the previous ones that had damaged our healthcare in the name of austerity or the discredited idea that private companies could run public services better than public services.

The NHS was one of the biggest issues in that election but too many people felt there was nothing they could do about it. We saw the lowest turnout in the election, the lowest since ordinary people had the vote.

One conversation comes to mind, one in Ellesmere Port Market(a great place!). A woman said there was nothing they could do about it however bad it was. We said that the suffragettes managed to change things, without even having the vote, that slaves got slavery abolished, that we do not send kids up the chimney anymore, and that the fight for the NHS was from the people not from political parties.

We also want to do a shout-out to the Lodge Lane food pantry, a great crowd of people who gave our van a real welcome.

Keep our NHS Public commented after the election;

“The NHS must be set back on its feet once more. For this to happen, health services must be restored in line with the founding principles of the NHS and social care needs radical transformation. However, it is of great concern that this does not appear to be the vision for the NHS put forward by Starmer and Streeting throughout the election, and we call on the new Labour Government to declare an immediate national emergency in health and care, as have the BMA and the RCN.“

It would be so much better if Repairing and Restoring the NHS was once again a serious commitment from one of the political parties but it still is not. We must make the issue of restoring and repairing the NHS such a big campaign that politicians must listen.

 The NHS needs proper investment NOT “reform” and privatisation. This campaign joins with NHS workers Say No in saying #Wes change your plans #no to NHS privatisation.

Our campaign is part of a wider campaign in Cheshire and Merseyside to restore and repair the NHS. The local ICB we know is short of funds but now has been told to bring in a private company to look at how it can reduce costs. This is ridiculous. Liverpool Women’s Hospital requires additional funding to keep safe. Funding comes through the ICB. We are far from the only hospital or service in that situation. It is an intolerable situation and we call for public support to stop this dangerous nonsense. The lives and health of our precious babies and the health and at times lives of their mothers depend on improving the healthcare.

We warned the ICB that last winter would be dreadful in the NHS and dreadful it was. We need urgent action now to prevent another set of winter problems in this area.

Our hearts go out to the women and children of Gaza, especially to the pregnant and new mums. Cry justice for the dead and injured. We weep and rage with the patients whose doctors and health workers who have been willfully killed by Israel or tortured in Israeli prisons in this terrible onslaught. We mourn too the dead of Ukraine and those in all the other conflict zones.#CeasefireNow#StopGenocide#SavetheChildren.

With your help, in person or through donations, we will grow our NHS maternity campaign so it cannot be missed. Remember every campaign requires people to talk to their friends about the issue. These little conversations are the seeds of success.

What can you do?

1 Talk to your friends and workmates about the need for a fully funded publicly owned NHS.

2. Get involved with the campaign personally.

3. Tell us about your experiences and suggestions

4. Make formal complaints about poor service to the hospital and to your MPs and councillors. We can help.

4. Get your union branch or other organisation involved in the campaign. Ask us to send a speaker.

5 Give out leaflets in your street.

6 Put up posters.

7 Come to our events. Look out for events when the Labour Conference comes to Liverpool at the end of September.

 It is a hard struggle but we can do it.