Please help the struggle to restore the NHS. ‘People power’ can change government policies, and the current neoliberal, pro-privatisation, pro-business policies are at the root of the problems in our hospitals, in our GP practices and in social care. Write to your MPs, write to your councillors, raise it in your union branch, make the NHS the talk of the town, of the  streets, of the communities, of the workforces.

Look out for the public meeting that will be held.

Stay safe and keep warm. Put the heating on.

Restore the NHS as a fully public service, funded and staffed for all our mothers, daughters, sisters, friends, lovers, and every baby.

Restore the NHS as a fully public service, funded and staffed for all people.

We are the Save Liverpool Women’s Hospital Campaign. In this post, we are asking our supporters to also support the urgent initiatives from other organisations. The damage to Liverpool Women’s Hospital is symptomatic of all the problems of our NHS, and we fight for the whole NHS.

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

The staff and patients are feeling the harm done.

Our local hospitals are in the crisis which we warned about repeatedly, which was predicted, and anticipated. And all the while there were multiple meetings about how to make financial cuts (CIPs),and implement unprecedented (and we think, harmful) financial restrictions and huge reorganisation plans, not to deal with the winter crisis, nor the infant mortality issues, or the gynaecology waiting times, nor birth trauma, but to close services.

The winter crisis was and is avoidable. Capacity should have been built into the system. If Covid taught us one thing it was that we must have emergency capacity. Building capacity means planning well in advance in areas like staffing, in space and equipment, in funding, involving  both hospital and community health provision, in action to employ more GPs,in making schools healthier, in  mobilising all public services, and if necessary taking over private hospital capacity. Health campaigners have raised this in written and oral questions repeatedly since 2023, more than a year ago. The response was that this winter would be (according to the CEO of the ICB) “…slightly more austere than the previous two years.” The managers of the NHS, nationally and locally, knew what was coming this winter.

The future of Liverpool Women’s Hospital is in grave danger. Please sign our petition here if you have not already done so. Thankfully, LWH is still there and not (yet) fully merged with the other hospitals. Imagine pregnant women in 50 hour waits in A and E, as is happening today in Cheshire and Merseyside.

We raised all this repeatedly with the ICB, but the government made them follow Price Waterhouse Cooper’s cuts agenda, and didn’t that work well ? Fifty damn hours in the A and E!

Do not blame the flu! Do not blame the elders for staying too long in hospital. Privatising social care was a huge blunder. Impoverishing local authorities was a huge blunder.

Save Liverpool Women’s Hospital is one of many organisations fighting to win the NHS back to its true potential, back to being the best in the world.

It is our NHS . Our great grandmothers, and grandfathers fought long and hard for it and won it. For seven decades, we paid for it, invested in it, grew it. For years people voted Labour because of the NHS.

Women hold up half the sky, but 76% of the NHS. The NHS patient facing workforce is massively female, and we thank them for their skill, dedication, humour, and sheer hard graft. The NHS must become a better place to work. Enough is Enough with workplace stress in the NHS. We need more staff and we need to retain those we have. We need education for our NHS to be free.

Women’s health is damaged by more than a decade of neglect.

A Parliamentary report last month spoke of “Medical Misogyny”. The report said women were being left in pain and discomfort that “interferes with every aspect of their daily lives, including their education, careers, relationships and fertility, while their conditions worsen.“

We have a new(ish) Labour Government, after years of deliberate damage to the NHS from the Conservative and Coalition Governments. The trade unions, women’s organisations and the Labour Party fought for universal healthcare, publicly funded, and universally available, and won that battle. The NHS was a major reason to vote Labour as this region did in huge numbers. Yet Labour is throwing vastly more NHS money to the private sector.

We need another mass movement for the NHS to make this government listen.

Privatisation causes pain and harm in healthcare as it has in the railways, in water, in the post office, in royal mail, in telecoms, on the buses, in the power industry, in power, wherever it has touched public services. Private health care in the USA is a cruel, heartless scandal, but it costs the US government twice as much per head as the NHS costs the UK.

We need the billions Streeting is giving to the private sector in our hospitals.

Please sign this petition from “We Own it”. No to billions to the private sector while the NHS struggles.

Private hospitals use the same staff pool as does the NHS. We need more doctors midwives, nurses and other ( fully qualified!) medical professionals in the NHS, not in private hospitals. Private hospitals are not better, not safer, not well regulated, not actually the employers of their surgeons who need private insurance which can randomly be denied.

We oppose privatisation through the new ‘Big Data’ industries. See this shocking post from Keep our NHS Public research about Data.

We say no to privatisation in the NHS, no to the government giving billions to private hospitals. Buy the damn hospitals and put them into proper public service.

We say No to more PFI in our NHS. Sign a petition here