Tag: cuts

No to closure or merger of Liverpool Women’s Hospital.

What has Liverpool’s “Place” NHS and Cheshire and Merseyside ICB done whilst maternity care nationally is in a well-publicised crisis and thousands of women are furious about the level of care they and their babies received? While the public enquiry into baby deaths at Countess of Chester has just opened? While Alderhey is at the centre of the Physician Associates scandal? While they can’t stop the next winter crisis, already upon our hospitals?

They announce the intention to fundamentally change Liverpool Women’s Hospital. This was without even a meeting with the organisations that have campaigned for a decade to keep the hospital and collected 75,000 signatures to keep the hospital on the Crown Street site as a women’s hospital for all our mothers, daughters, friends, lovers and for every precious baby.

The whole ICB is facing huge problems and does not have the resources to deliver safe A and E in the coming months. Yet, they think launching a discussion about merging Liverpool Women’s Hospital into one conglomerate of hospitals is sane and responsible.

This is the state of the Integrated Care Board, which is the controlling body for the NHS in Cheshire and Merseyside. It is from page 110 in the Board papers. A score of 20 in black means it is at the highest risk possible. They also said:

“There are currently no known plans for any additional funding to be allocated ahead of winter to support additional capacity and the expectation is that maintaining system flow through winter will need to be achieved through the delivery of these improvement plans.“

The document about Liverpool Women’s Hospital’s future can be found here. We will produce a detailed critique next week.

Maternity and women’s health need urgent changes, but they don’t include dispersing services and absorbing Liverpool Women’s Hospital into one giant conglomerate. We want to see the following changes nationally and locally.

  1. Far better funding and staffing for maternity and an end to birth traumas.
  2. More respect must be given to women giving birth and the women tending them in giving birth.
  3. The funding currently given to insurance for maternity damages should be invested in the service to reduce those damages.
  4. Women who need induction of labour should get that intervention in a safe and timely manner.
  5. Fertility services must be fully available on the NHS, not the prerogative of the well-off.
  6. Gynaecology services must be drastically improved, nationally and locally.
  7. The NHS workforce must be given more respect, their workload improved, and the service must once more become a good place to work.
  8. The whole NHS must be returned to being a national, fully publicly provided service, fully funded, repaired, and restored after all the damages of more than ten years of austerity and many forms of privatisation.
  9. The public’s views must be respected – most women likely to use the hospital will be at work when this first meeting happens.
  10. The research conducted at Liverpool Women’s Hospital must continue into key areas like endometriosis, menopause, and working to ensure our prem babies live and thrive despite being born very early.
  11. Midwifery training must be made available to all without incurring huge debts.
  12. Women’s health and healthcare must be given far more resources and respect.

Our petition, which is available on-line is at 44,656 signatures and more than 30,000 signatures 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”

It has over seventy-five thousand signatures. The people of Liverpool have attended three big demonstrations to save the hospital. Campaigners have attended every board meeting of Liverpool Women’s Hospital since the petition was launched and every ICB meeting since that was formed. Yet we have never been invited to present our views. Promises of consultation made in public clearly meant nothing.

Twenty thousand signatures were presented to the ICB in January 2023

Liverpool Women’s Hospital is a tertiary centre, which means patients are referred there from other hospitals from the rest of Merseyside and Cheshire, the Isle of Man and parts of Wales. Keeping that provision and the reputation that goes with it is important. The provision for the babies in the neonatal unit, near their mums, matters too.

We have said for years that the NHS must change the maternity tariff, the amount of money paid to hospitals for delivering maternity care. Liverpool Women’s Hospital is the largest provider of maternity care and is badly hit by how low the tariff is. Liverpool Women’s Hospital runs a deficit because of this, and over the years appears to have made some bad decisions on staffing because of the financial problems. Many midwives left. Yet somehow,the document from the ICB says:

“The case for change is focussed solely on the clinical risks, issues and outcomes for people using hospital-based gynaecology and maternity services. It does not consider productivity or value for money.”

The ICB is in serious financial trouble yet it claims not to be considering money in this situation.

We say that right from the beginning, it has been about money. It was about the decision made nearly a decade ago to close one of the Liverpool Hospitals to save money at the cost of our health. It is also about disrespecting women’s health and women’s opinions.

“We’ve known for some time that the poorest households and women have shouldered the greatest burden of austerity measures.” Women’s health has suffered particularly in this time. Liverpool has seen some of the worst overall loss of healthcare. Yet we still kept Liverpool Women’s as a treasured service, where most of Liverpool’s babies are born and where great steps have been made in research. We said before and say it again “In these hard times. what we have we hold.”

Should we leave structural issues in our health care to “the professionals”? No way. The big managers of the NHS have caused havoc in the last ten years, implementing austerity, privatisation, and the move towards an American model. We have seen more than a decade of damage.

Remember the chaos of the building of Liverpool Royal, with fewer beds than the old one and now needing more, with chaos in the financing, construction, and demolition?

We call on the city of Liverpool to defend what we have in the NHS and to fight to improve the rest. No closures, no loss of services, no more mergers, no more outsourcing, no more overworked staff.

Please sign our petition here

Please attend any of the public meetings that you can get to. The first is this one:

When: 9th October 2024, 9.00am to 11.30am.

Where: Liverpool 1 Suite, Holiday Inn, Lime Street, Liverpool, L1 1NQ

The future of Liverpool Women’s Hospital is no safer this week.

Save Liverpool Women’s Hospital News May 2024.

Liverpool Women’s Hospital will not get a new building on the Royal Site. This announcement has been expected for some time. The BBC covered the story this week. On Radio Merseyside our campaign was asked to comment. We said that we were not surprised . The Hospital should stay on the Crown Street site and that what matters is proper funding, staffing, and resources because our babies deserve the best.

Our huge 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.

What’s happening with the  Liverpool Women’s Hospital?

There has been a press announcement that there will be no new women’s hospital built on the Royal site in the near future.

This announcement does not mean the future of Liverpool Women’s Hospital is safe, far from it. Public consultation about its future will be launched shortly.

The announcement is not a surprise to anyone who has followed the story of Liverpool Women’s Hospital or the story of broken promises from the Government about building new hospitals, even those in dire physical conditions.

For example in Leeds, the people were promised a new Children’s Hospital. In the meantime, services were dispersed to different hospitals to allow demolition. Now the new Hospital is not going to happen.

Nationally, maternity is underfunded and understaffed and has seen terrible scandals. We have written much about this in other posts.  Just this week there was a report about delayed induction of labour across the country (and this also has been seen in Liverpool Women’s Hospital). The Care Quality Commission reported “The quality of maternity, mental health and ambulance services has seen a “notable decline” over the last year, which is contributing to “unfair care” and worsening health inequalities,”

The Neonatal Unit at Liverpool Women’s Hospital

The Health Service Journal  also reported that

“families whose babies died and whose mothers were harmed – in some cases dying – in the East Kent maternity scandal were still having to prove legal liability to get any compensation. This is despite Bill Kirkup’s report, published around 18 months ago, having already looked at their cases in detail and reached conclusions on whether better care could have led to different outcomes.

But NHS Resolution, which handles the NHS’s clinical negligence claims, says causation and a breach of duty of care will need to be proved in each case. This may mean families have to engage not just lawyers but also experts in midwifery, obstetrics, and neonatal care.”

In such a national maternity crisis we must protect the services we have in the area. We say women and babies will be harmed if the Liverpool Women’s Hospital is forced into a merger with the huge general hospital. The focus on women and babies will be lost. The great maternity scandals of our age have happened where there was no real focus on women and babies.

The government and the NHS bureaucracy have wanted to close one hospital in Liverpool since 2015. Liverpool Women’s Hospital was chosen. This is to do with saving money not patient care.

Liverpool Women’s Hospital sits on a great site on Crown Street. The official opening was on 7th November 1995 and the building is in good condition. A £20million pound neonatal unit was recently added to the hospital. It does not need a rebuild.

Liverpool Women’s Hospital does need more staff and additional resources like a proper blood service, an improved emergency medicine service, a 24/7 consultant obstetric presence. It needs to tackle the long waiting list for Gynaecology treatment,  and improved intensive care. All of this requires funding and support from the national health service and government funding but without that funding our babies and mothers will suffer. The money must be provided.

Our Saturday stall n Bold Street

All hospitals should be run in a cooperative system with other hospitals but specialisms should be protected.

Liverpool Women’s Hospital, along with the whole of the UK, needs to improve infant mortality, maternal mortality and injuries to women and babies and to tackle gross inequalities.

Serious damage has been done to our health care. We see it in the terrible waiting times in Accident and Emergency, in the 14,000 preventable deaths caused by those A and E problems, we see it in dentistry, in the GP service, in mental health and in maternity. We see it in the eight million people on waiting lists. We see it in the exhausted staff.

The experience women have giving birth is getting worse because of these underlying, national problems and the day-to-day stress this brings into the hospital.

Liverpool Women’s Hospital is damaged too by the business model imposed on the hospitals. The drive to privatise and to move away from a service model in the NHS has caused problems all this century.

The new Chief Executive (James Sumner) and Chair of Liverpool Women’s Hospital (David Flory) are also the Chief Executive and Chair of the Royal, Aintree and Broadgreen Hospitals (Liverpool University  Hospitals Foundation Trust). Neither man is a specialist in maternal or infant health. The Health Service Journal has said these joint appointments are likely to lead to a merger of Liverpool Women’s with the big hospital. We say no to a merger, and a big yes to cooperation between all the hospitals in the area. Such cooperation is anathema to the privatisers. We need continued support from the people of Liverpool to win this fight and we need to link up with other maternity campaigners.

Please help Save Liverpool Women’s Hospital. Sign the petition, talk to friends family and workplaces about this, join the discussion, and help with leafleting and social media.

Invite us to speak to your organisation.

 Send us a donation.

 For all our mothers, sisters, daughters, friends, and lovers and for every baby