Tag: crisis

“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.

Bleak midwinter 2025! Another reason to fight to restore the NHS.

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.

lobbying the ICB, last winter!!

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