Tag: birth

“Deeds not Words” for women giving birth!

Restore, Repair and Rebuild NHS maternity care after the Ockendon and Amos reports!

Donna Ockendon who conducted the Nottingham review
Valerei Amos who conducted the national review

In the last week of June, 2026, we saw two hugely significant reports on the damage to NHS maternity services. One report was from Donna Ockendon about long term harm done at Nottingham Hospitals. The other, the Independent National Maternity and Neonatal Investigation, was from Valerie Amos about the situation in ten other major hospitals. The reports describe brutal harm to so many women and babies.

Our love and solidarity go out to all whose pregnancy journey ended in achingly empty arms. Our hearts go out to families who lost their mothers and to the mothers so badly injured physically, emotionally or in their mental health. The additional pain when such an outcome could have been prevented is unspeakable.We send solidarity to those damaged by racism and to those women who were worst off financially and worst served by the Maternity service.

Save Liverpool Women’s Hospital Campaign says;

We demand immediate, significant and lasting improvements in the National Health Service maternity services across the country, in Cheshire and Merseyside and crucially in Liverpool. What we have known from women’s personal experiences has now been presented as formal reports. But many other reports raised the alarm before June 2026. Governments, NHS top bosses and the media knew what was happening long before recent reports and they clearly thought it acceptable, because they let the situation fester.

No ifs, no buts, no whining excuses. Things must change! Invest don’t cut! Babies not Bombs!

Deeds not words are required. We need the spirit of the suffragettes.

The New York Times photo archive via Picryl.com

For all our mothers, sisters, daughters, friends and lovers and for all the babies save Liverpool Women’s Hospital and every maternity hospital and service in the UK!

If these reports are brushed under the carpet as the twenty or more previous reports have been, this harm will be further normalized and the damage extended to ever more women and babies.

There must be immediate,and sustained improvements in the respect given to women, improvements in staffing, in resources, in buildings and equipment, and in management. No more cuts, no more bullying management!

Pregnant women, the communities, and the front-line staff must be included in decisions made about how these these improvements must look and feel.

We stand with the staff who kept the service afloat under terrible conditions. We acknowledge the Midwives who marched in 2022 and who are organising protests this year. We recognise that so many midwives left the profession in protest at the conditions in which women and babies were treated. We demand consequences for the government ministers, the senior managers and senior staff in the higher echelons of the NHS, and in Government, who saw the damage and ignored midwives’ and doctors’ complaints.

To women thinking of having a baby we say that even now most women have good outcomes. Some of the maternity services in the UK provide wonderful service. Do not assume the horrible conditions described in the reports from Donna Ockendon and Valarie Amos represent every birth.If you can, if you have the headspace, we welcome your involvement in this campaign.

picture credit Amanda Greavette

We demand safer working conditions and improved staffing for midwives, obstetricians, anesthetists and all the related workforce. The NHS needs more midwives, more obstetricians, and related professions, not as a one off but consistently over a decade.

All those involved in individual acts of cruelty, malice or neglect must be held accountable, but so must the senior administrators and politicians who knowingly allowed this situation to develop and continue.

Britain can afford a good maternity service. Not having good maternity services is far more expensive. Yet in July 2026 maternity hospitals including Liverpool Women’s Hospital are expected to make cuts. How is this justifiable?

The NHS began seventy-eight years ago when the country was far poorer and reeling from the damage – emotionally, physical, and financial, done by World War Two. Our city was one of the worst affected. Liverpool’s children were still playing in bombsites, as the NHS was founded. It is obscene for the government to pretend that today we can’t afford safe care. In 1948 the country decided it was important and invested in the NHS. In turn, this dramatically improved the lives of women and babies.

Women need a greater voice in the service. Women giving birth must be heeded and treated as adults. Women have had to fight for their rights before and will fight now.

The damage to maternity is echoed in so many other aspects of the NHS. We see the overcrowded hospitals and corridor care, the long waiting lists and the over worked staff, the neglected buildings and the money wasted on huge privatisation projects. We see the unfilled vacancies and unsafe cuts. We see the billions handed to big corporations from NHS funds and the unsafe care as treatments are outsourced to for profit companies. Demand that the NHS is restored, repaired and rebuilt!

Join us in campaigning for respect for women’s right to choose their own birth options, more respect for women giving birth, better staffing, and an immediate end to cuts. Every woman and man involved in this campaign helps make the future of maternity better.

Even as Donna Ockendon was conducting her harrowing review into Nottingham’s maternity failings, the local ICB closed the infant bereavement services at the hospital as a cost cutting measure. They knew what Donna Ockendon was doing and still went ahead with brutal cuts.

Don’t think that public indignation alone will make the government take lasting action. Long after the Grenfell fire no one has been punished, nor have other high rise blocks with cladding all been made safe.

Every woman who helps in any little way helps make the NHS safer, makes a difference. We have to build a large movement, deep in all our communities to secure the safety of mothers and babies, and that needs lots of women getting involved.

Fight like your nanas and great nanas did when they fought for and won universal healthcare, free at the point of need.

Mary Bamber, a working class woman fought in Liverpool a century ago for women’s rights and for healthcare for women.

Join us too in fighting for the future of Liverpool Women’s Hospital, the largest maternity hospital in the country. Sign our petition here. At least now the ICB can no longer keep saying integration into a main hospital is always safer. We know of many problems at Liverpool Women’s Hospital, it is far from perfect. However, Liverpool Women’s did not have the bad outcomes described in these reports. We thank the staff for that.

More than ten years ago Save Liverpool Women’s Hospital Campaign was founded to stop Liverpool Women’s Hospital being forced into Liverpool Royal, and to defend maternity services in Liverpool. We have fought on and on. Liverpool Women’s Hospital still on site. The fight goes on to get all the staff and funding it needs but more than 90,000 people have supported us. If you fight you might just win, but if you don’t you will always loose. The struggle for safe and respectful maternity care is a life and death struggle we need to win.

In the 1970s women fought for better maternity care, including letting partners into the Labour Ward, giving women a say in their treatment. That campaign reached many women. We did see change for the better. The charity Aims(Association for Improvements in the Maternity Services) is one of the organisations that was set up in the 1970s during that time of successful campaigning.

Please invite our campaign to come and speak at your organisation, however small. We will publish a more detailed comment on these reports when we as a group have had a chance to discuss them in detail. If you would like to be involved in such discussions please contact us on savelwh@outlook.com or by commenting on the comments section of the blog. For detailed background information see this article from Keep our NHS Public website.

Still Saying It. Save the NHS, Save Liverpool Women’s Hospital.

“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.