Tag: engagement

There is more to this “engagement ” than meets the eye!

We are campaigning for the best possible healthcare for Women and babies in Liverpool and beyond.The whole of the NHS has been damaged by under funding and privatization. There has been deep disrespect for the people’s health and especially the health of women and babies.The maternity service nationally is scandalously underfunded, understaffed, and under-resourced. Liverpool Women’s Hospital has been under threat all of this time. Our Campaign has fought hard for the NHS and especially for the Women’s Hospital. More than ninety thousand people have signed our petition, both online and on paper. We are still collecting signatures The 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 very best.

Why is this important? All the maternity and women’s health provision of Liverpool was pulled into this one site. It’s a much-loved hospital. It provides crucial specialised care and the daily joy of new babies. It has a £20 million new neonatal unit and a new diagnostics centre being built. The driving force for closure is a clumsy funding structure, not the needs of women and babies. This is a modern hospital on a good site. and for our mothers, sisters, daughters, wives, lovers, and friends. The alternative wards in the new Royal are not equivalent.

This is a modern hospital on a good site. Our taxes built it for our babies and for our women.

You can see campaigners handing in 20,000 signatures  from the petition here.

Sign online here

In June and July 2026, the plans for the future of Liverpool Women’s Hospital are out for a public ‘engagement’ exercise. We believe the information being given to the public is inadequate. The process will feature just  Option 2. Although a relatively small change, Option 2 is intended to be the forerunner of moving the whole service to the Royal.We say this is unacceptable. These decisions were as plain as the nose on your face at the Cheshire and Merseyside NHS Integrated care Board meeting in January.( The public can attend) These intentions should be made plain to everyone attending the engagement meetings.

This exercise is part of an intention to, over time, move treatment for women from Crown Street. As we understand it from board papers and attending the ICB, the initial group of women to have treatment under this scheme will be the most complex elective surgical cases in obstetrics and gynecology, who need either immediate access to the highest level of long-term intensive care or joint care from doctors with specialism not included in the Women’s.

Emergency patients are not included and cannot be included. They will still need the specialist doctors. We believe short-term intensive care is available at Liverpool Women’s Hospital. Occasionally, a very ill woman might be best served by ambulance transfer  to the Royal or another hospital. The Women’s  Hospital reported that they are developing a team for deteriorating patients. We hope this is in place quickly because it is much needed. Meanwhile Option 2 does not address the real issues at Liverpool Women’s Hospital.

How to take part in the Engagement about the future of Liverpool Women’s Hospital

Details of how to take part in this very limited public engagement can be found below, but please read our information on the process too. We believe there are significant omissions in the published case.

If you would like to attend the engagement meetings, they are on.

•Monday 15 June, 2.00pm at Merseyside Fire & Rescue Conference Centre, Bridle Road, Bootle, Sefton, L30 4YD

•Monday 29 June, 11.00am at The Old School House, St John’s Road, Huyton, Knowsley, L36 0UX

• Tuesday 30 June, 5.00pm at Blair Bell Room, Liverpool Women’s Hospital, Crown Street, Toxteth, Liverpool, L8 7SS

This is the registration page link for three public meetings.

Information Sessions – Improving hospital gynaecology and maternity services in Liverpool.

We believe  hospitals should work cooperatively, together. The  healthcare legislation from Thatcher onward, including the disastrous 2012 Health and Care Act, damaged the natural cooperation between hospitals. Our healthcare has fewer hospital beds per head of population than other advanced countries, fewer doctors per head of population than other countries. To match other countries we would have to hire thousands more doctors. But we have unemployed doctors, The Royal College of General Practice described how qualified G.P.s cannot find posts and the Resident doctors cannot find training posts. This while we need doctors. One in 3 newly qualified midwives cannot find work and other have only part time work. The Independent reported on 4th June 2026 about midwives being told to work double shift with no sleep.

UK needs more doctors!

It does not have to be like this. Such madness must stop. Women say No to this nonsense!

Liverpool Royal Hospital, though new and shiny, and with a great staff, has fewer beds than the hospital it replaced. The Royal is overcrowded, as can clearly be seen in the  scandalous long trolley waits in A and E, and in the boarding system, not just during the winter.

Liverpool Royal Hospital photo credit Wikki Commons

Some Women’s Hospital services will be dispersed to other places, including some to Aintree. This will mean reduced services Liverpool Women’s Hospital on Crown Street, and considerable extra management requirements to keep track of all the staff and patients in different places.

This will not improve the issues driving the complaints we hear, nor the ones described at the board, which come from lack of staff and resources, failure to heed women and staff raising concerns, and from disrespect for women or medical misogyny, as the government prefer to call it.

The board of Liverpool Women’s Hospital has  given its functions to the NHS University Hospitals of Liverpool Group. That is where board decisions are now taken. There was no public consultation on this. It was driven in part by the acute financial problems at Liverpool Women’s  Hospital and at the Royal. That board did not mention maternity in its long term plans at the last board meeting. Maternity should be a high priority in any hospital providing that service.

At a recent NHS University Hospitals of Liverpool Board, the figures for building a new hospital for Liverpool Women’s were given as between £350m and £ 500m, and the cost of making the Crown Street site safer was £6 million a year. So it would take 90 years to be cheaper to build.

We believe the information being  given to the public in this engagement  is inadequate.

This is not just about some small subset of operations happening at Liverpool Royal Hospital. This is a part of a  much larger plan to move Liverpool Women’s services into the Royal.The decisions were made at the January  Cheshire and Merseyside NHS Integrated Care Board, the ICB.

Option 2 is what is being discussed in the engagement process, and bad though that is, Option 6 is the longer-term plan.

The January ICB meeting made it clear (on video 21 minutes  -44 minutes in), “…there is no stepping back from the long-term solving of this issue [meaning Option 6] and the need to press the centre and the region for the resource availability and a big capital spend on this…’ ( Sir David Henshaw, the chair of the ICB. This” big capital spend” will  compete with  other claims on NHS maternity spending.

The public information can be found here: https://www.gynaeandmaternityliverpool.nhs.uk/archives/

The options

We published our thoughts here after the January 2026 meeting of the ICB agreed its plans for the future of Liverpool Women’s Hospital, plans we think are fundamentally wrong and impractical. There is no room at the Royal. We need better funding for Liverpool Women’s and better systems of cross-hospital cooperation.

There have been improvements at Liverpool Women’s Hospital,as reported at the last Group board meeting

https://www.uhliverpool.nhs.uk/about-us/events/details?occurrenceID=382&returnID=423

There are also a set of problems at Liverpool Women’ reported at the last Group Board meeting.

” Risk: LWH does not offer the full range of clinical support services required for delivery of complex and tertiary maternity and gynecology services.Cause: Lack of access to clinical support services at Crown Street”

These posts include dietetics, stoma care, occupational therapy, respiratory physiotherapy, dietetics, SALT, pain services and psychology.These are posts that could and should be created. it is not clear exactly why they are not provided at the Women’s but they can and should be so provided. The hospital is in deep financial trouble caused by Government under funding and the particular pressures on Cheshire and Merseyside funding. Other issues have been tackled recently. CIP means Cost Improvement Plans:Cuts to you and me. £12.71 million of them while the hospital lacks some services. The world of NHS cuts is utterly unacceptable

The major maternity crisis in England.

We await two huge reports on the state of maternity care in the UK, one from the redoubtable Donna Ockendon, who has spent two years working on a report from Nottingham. And one from Valerie Amos, who is writing a report for the government. Her interim report was damning. Women want respect in maternity care. The mainstream press is finally picking up what social media and our experiences  have been telling us for years. Don’t think for a minute that the  politicians and the top NHS bureaucrats didn’t know years ago about the damage going on.

Such is the fear of the state of maternity care that many women are very worried, even avoiding hospital care.

Maternity Buildings are in a poor state.We have a very  good building on a good site at Liverpool Women’s Hospital, the Royal is new but not without problems, the Cancer centre is quite new, as is Alder Hey. However the situation in some maternity hospitals is  scandalous. Years of Austerity have caused huge damage to the buildings in the NHS.

“Against a backdrop of a £13.8 billion maintenance backlog across the entire NHS estate, over half of organisations reported the formal condition of their maternity and neonatal estate as unsatisfactory, with 42% in need a major repair or replacement and 7% running a serious risk of imminent breakdown.” The Maternity and Neonatal Infrastructure Review Findings report 11th September 2025

Liverpool Women’s Hospital has been affected in the Maternity crisis, with some women, including some of our campaigners, furious over the treatment they received. We are not a fan club for Liverpool Women’s Hospital, nor do we speak for them. We speak for the campaign to Save Liverpool Women’s Hospital. We also have huge admiration for the work of the staff at Liverpool Women’s Hospital, who, despite the difficulties, deliver some excellent service.

Staff have held the service together despite the cuts

We understand they often work with one hand tied behind them due to a lack of resources and management tactics. We are happy to have supported health workers’ picket lines and protests, including the March with Midwives in 2022.

Our Campaign wants Liverpool Women’s Hospital to stay on Crown Street, to be much better funded and much better staffed. We call for it to keep all its services together, on one site (with a better bus service to make the site even more accessible). We want it managed to maximise the health of women and babies. We want all the hospitals to work  in cooperation as one health service. But we want to keep the focus on women’s health, and of course, the health of all the dearly loved babies. Splitting the services will cause damage to those services and grief and annoying inconvenience for years to come. Imagine some clinics being at Crown Street, some at Aintree, some at the Royal, and some, God knows where. Imagine navigating that with a baby and a toddler.

Far Worse than inconvenience and thereby missed appointments, there is a very real danger of women’s health issues being further minimised and ignored. That is what has been happening in the NHS (and in other countries that have adopted austerity as policy) for the last twenty years, and these problems have been centred in the big, merged hospitals. The reports of major scandals being investigated by Valarie Amos are in the big hospitals. Leeds and Shrewsbury were removed from the list because of other ongoing enquiries. The 14 NHS trusts are:

  • Barking, Havering and Redbridge University Hospitals NHS Trust
  • Blackpool Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust
  • Bradford Teaching Hospitals Foundation NHS Trust
  • East Kent Hospitals Foundation NHS Trust
  • Gloucestershire Hospitals Foundation NHS Trust
  • Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust
  • Oxford University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust
  • Sandwell and West Birmingham Hospitals NHS Trust
  • The Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust
  • The Queen Elizabeth Hospital, King’s Lynn NHS Foundation Trust
  • University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust
  • University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay NHS Foundation Trust
  • University Hospitals Sussex NHS Foundation Trust
  • Somerset NHS Foundation Trust

The worst-off women, and those from Black, Asian, Gypsy-Romany and Traveller backgrounds, have been most damaged in this Maternity crisis. Please see our earlier posts.

Liverpool Women’s Hospital is at the heart of Liverpool 8 and much loved there. It seems very bad to be damaging Liverpool Women’s Hospital just as these reports are due to be published. A large public meeting chaired by Kim Johnson MP made the opinions of local people very clear.

Liverpool Women’s Hospital is well-loved.

The women of Liverpool have loved the Liverpool Women’s Hospital since it opened, and they loved the previous women’s spaces like Catherine Street and Mill Road. Far too many women experience domestic and sexual violence and are aware, in brain and instinct, of the need for a safe space, organised by and for women, when they are at their most vulnerable. But it’s not just violence – medical misogyny plays a role too.

This love of the Women’s Hospital has a scientific base. The NHS has truly ignored women’s health.

“Women’s bodies have been treated as medical mysteries, not because they are complex, but because they have been excluded. From research funding to clinical trials, a gender data gap runs deep through modern medicine, shaping who gets believed, who gets diagnosed, and who gets left behind.

Less than 2.5% of medical research funding goes to women’s reproductive health – despite women and girls making up more than half the world’s population 1 .

This imbalance is not an accident; it reflects a pattern of medical misogyny, a system that undervalues, underfunds, and misunderstands women’s health.

The consequences are devastating. Women are being dismissed, misdiagnosed, or left in pain for years before receiving answers. Many turn to online communities for help after being told by doctors that their symptoms are “normal”, that they are “making a fuss about nothing”. For people with endometriosis, the average diagnosis time is nearly nine years. Nine years of pain, endless appointments, and disbelief.”

It’s vitally important to keep a women’s space. Not just a physical space, but a place of science and care devoted to women and their babies. A space with a well-qualified and well-treated workforce focusing on women’s health, where women are heeded as women and not dismissed. There is a quiet but fierce rage behind the demands for a woman’s place in healthcare.

No one can deny that the fashion for huge hospitals has at least coincided with real drops in the quality of maternity care and long waiting lists for Gynaecology.  These mergers started in the 1990s with the policy of making hospitals work like competing businesses, and then a second wave in 2010 with the Foundation Trust era, as smaller hospitals were pushed into mergers by a financing model that favoured the big hospitals This at least coincided with  the deterioration of Women’s health care. Women’s health has indeed deteriorated.

Parliament’s Women’s Equality Committee ( these are MPs, not the government) has twice described the situation for women in great detail but has not been able to secure the necessary funding to improve matters. The first WEC report stated that ‘Medical misogyny’ is leaving women in unnecessary pain and undiagnosed for years”.

We also recognise the importance of the physical environment, and Liverpool Women’s is one of the best hospitals in that respect.

Austerity and political misogyny have a lot to do with the neglect of, and damage to, women’s health. The NHS has been underfunded and consequently understaffed for the years of Austerity, and the future is looking grim too. In 2025-6 and 2026-7, the cuts imposed in Cheshire and Merseyside NHS and through them to the Hospitals and out-of-hospital care are awful. For more details, see this.

Hospitals are under huge financial and political pressure. See Liverpool Women’s Hospital in the Eye, The NHS Storms, written earlier this year.

Women’s health and healthcare in the NHS

Women in England have a life expectancy of about 83 years, but their Healthy Life Expectancy (HLE) is roughly 61.9 years. This means women live upwards of 20 years in ill health.

This is worse in areas where people are struggling with the cost of living, and worse for women with high caring responsibilities, like much of Liverpool, especially where the cost of living is hitting hardest.

And;

“One key point is how females and males differ in many biological and social factors that fluctuate and, sometimes, accumulate over time, resulting in them experiencing health and disease differently at each stage of life and across world regions. The challenge now is to design, implement and evaluate sex- and gender-informed ways of preventing and treating the major causes of morbidity and premature mortality from an early age and across diverse populations.”

The NHS has not done such a good job in the big general hospitals in achieving that understanding, nor in establishing good practice, so there remains a good case for a women’s hospital.

“What happens in pregnancy and early childhood impacts on physical and emotional health all the way through to adulthood the UK dropped from 20th to 26th place (out of 38) in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) on female life expectancy between 2000 and 2022. This compares with a drop from 14th to 19th place for male life expectancy during the same period healthy life expectancy among women fell by 2.5 years between 2019 to 2021 and 2022 to 2024”.

Heart and Cancer, too, have neglected women.

It’s not just in the exclusively female aspects of medicine that we see neglect of women. It is true in heart and cancer, too.

There is much written and studied about women and heart disease.

“Recent data published by Professor Chris Gale from the University of Leeds, funded by the British Heart Foundation, found that more than 8,200 women in England and Wales could have survived their heart attacks had they simply been given the same quality of treatment as men, according to their paper in the journal Heart. The researchers found that women in the UK had more than double the rate of death in the 30 days following their heart attack than men. The researchers suggest that this may be, in part, explained by women being less likely to receive guideline-recommended care.”

Some heart/cardiovascular diseases are exclusive to women and linked to their reproductive health. The improvements must come from all sectors of the NHS.

Women have different heart attack symptoms from men, and it helps if we know these symptoms. It helps if the NHS remembers them too!

Cancer

Several years of National Cancer Patient Experience Survey data shows that women are less likely to be treated with dignity and respect and less able to discuss their worries when receiving hospital care than men – an indictment of NHS culture. The NHS’s inability to listen, itsreluctance to give patients meaningfulpower and choice, and its tendency to disempower patients despite them being the real experts in their own health conditions, is ‘by design’.

They also say, “That is to say, it is a feature of a care model that is:

• one size fits all

• too focused on provider interests, rather than patient interests

• highly paternalistic, centralised and bureaucratic”

The NHS gets a pasting in these reports, but we think something big is missing from the reports.

NHS staff have faced obstacles in getting the resources they need to treat people as they should be treated . Years of cuts, privatisation, and meddling with NHS structure have caused huge damage, and the staff carry no blame for that. Rather, they have worked against the odds to maintain the service.

Lord Darzi, who produced a report about the NHS immediately after the General Election, said, “The Health and Social Care Act of 2012 was a calamity without international precedent. It proved disastrous.” We think the Health and Social Care Act 2022 was another disaster, and Wes Streeting’s sweeping attacks on NHSE and the ICBs have caused another wave of disruption.

We support the original NHS model. This was a universal healthcare service, free at the point of need and paid for by the government. It was a national service with all parts cooperating, but with strong local involvement. Investing in health care makes the economy stronger, not weaker, and helps the population’s health and happiness. Even the right-wing World Bank says so. The wave of privatisation and for-profit companies being involved in the NHS has been an utter failure for patients and staff.

It is a crying shame that Labour politicians, including the not lamented Health Secretary Streeting, have taken money from those who make big profits from healthcare.

The situation in Liverpool is especially serious. In the document Health in Liverpool 2040, it was made clear that the health of women in Liverpool is declining.

“In Liverpool, women can expect to live 57.9 years in good health, and men up to 58.3 years-this means on average women will spend 28% of their lives in poor health, whilst men will spend 23% poorly.

For women, healthy life expectancy is lower than at the turn of the decade, and the gap with England has widened from 5.5 years to 6 years, while for men, the gap continues to be 4.8 years.

“The infant mortality rate has long been regarded as a key indicator of population health that is sensitive to the prevailing socioeconomic circumstances affecting children. In Liverpool, around 26 infants every year do not reach their first birthday.”

“What happens in pregnancy and early childhood impacts on physical and emotional health all the way through to adulthood”

All of this supports a focus on women’s and children’s health, needs currently not being met nationally or locally. This in not to the detriment of men, but because women have different needs

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

Women also experience sexual and domestic violence, poverty through low wages and inadequate childcare. It takes two incomes to raise a family. Hospitals can only contribute about one-third of what is needed for good health for women. Good affordable food, good housing, clean air, low stress, well-paid jobs, confidence in the future, freedom from assault all help our health outside  hospital. But when we as women come into the hospital, it is because we need help. That help must be skilled, respectful, compassionate and well funded.

Too Many Hospitals in Liverpool ?

The NHS seems to believe that there are too many hospitals in Liverpool; they have done for years. The history of this was covered in a Post article called “https://www.livpost.co.uk/a-fucking-feudal-baron-the-long-legacy-of-liverpools-most-feared-nhs-boss/ The article says that a fan of Mrs Thatcher running the local NHS in the 1980s pushed through all the hospitals in Liverpool becoming Foundation Trusts. Liverpool has a different pattern of hospital care from many other cities, and the government wants to change that. It is pushing the ICBs and Hospitals to make drastic cuts.

In 2014, there was a Panorama programme saying that Liverpool has too many hospitals.  The next day, it was announced in the Echo that Liverpool Women’s was the hospital that would close.

We started our petition, at first online and then on paper, and we have fought for many years to keep the hospital open.

The process of merging the hospital is underway.

The board-level management of Liverpool Women’s Hospital has been handed, without public consultation, to the University Hospitals of Liverpool Group. However, the Chief Executive of that group has resigned. This coincided with plans to take all Liverpool Hospitals into that group being knocked back nationally. The public now has much less chance to monitor what goes on in Liverpool Women’s Hospital. Board papers cover all the hospitals, There have been major changes in the senior staff. There is no one on the board with a record of work in maternity, nor in Gynecology. The recent long-term plan, discussed in the May meeting of the hospital group, did not even mention maternity or women’s health.

We all have good  reasons to be concerned.

Save Liverpool Women’s Hospital: A Call to Action

We want to save Liverpool Women’s Hospital. We ask for your help in saving it. We call on the tradition of women struggling for our rights for our families and our communities. We have seen how women can mobilise and make their voices heard. We call on men to support us.

( This blog post has many links as evidence, but the reader does not need to read each to understand the post.)

The Cheshire and Merseyside ICB (the body that currently controls the NHS in Cheshire and Merseyside) has published its report on the engagement process for the future of Liverpool Women’s Hospital. This report has no proposals but says further work will be done. The report does not accurately reflect what we saw happen in the engagement meetings nor the number of responses we know went into the engagement from those who want to keep  Liverpool Women’s Hospital,  nor does it adequately recognise our 77,000 petition signatures, giving it just a passing mention, nor does it recognise our detailed and referenced response. It ignores public meetings hosted by MPS. It’s as though this campaign doesn’t exist, as though no one has objected. We will post a detailed reply shortly.

Meanwhile, the severe issues with our NHS and the Maternity service continue. Austerity continues and continues to cost the lives of women and babies. The Labour Government is continuing with Austerity and cuts. It is not repairing the NHS, but rather further embedding US for-profit health companies and data companies, like Palantir, into the service.

Whisper, chat, or shout about it – whichever way – we need to talk about the NHS. Our NHS is underfunded and understaffed, and its wealth is diverted to private profit by decision, not by accident. Women and babies are at risk. Gynaecology services are inadequate. The UK has the second-highest maternal death rate among eight major European nations, with only Slovakia performing worse, according to an analysis published in the BMJ last year.

This blog focuses on women’s health, Maternity, and children’s health and well-being, and, because it’s unavoidable, the situation in Accident and Emergency services. There are many other areas of concern about what’s happening in the different parts of the NHS. All these issues touch on and affect each other. Stand up and speak out for the NHS. We send solidarity to all the NHS campaign groups.

Understaffing is caused by underfunding and unnecessary pressures at work, leading to staff resigning and even leaving the profession. In 2024, despite staff shortages, hospitals were expected to make 6% cuts. (CIPS). Liverpool Women’s Hospital has had too little funding for over a decade. There have been times when the Care Quality Commission have criticised the hospital. In 2023, the CQC said, “Not all staff felt respected, supported, and valued. However, they remained focused on the needs of patients receiving care. Some staff had raised concerns several times regarding safety and staffing directly to senior leaders; however, they saw no quick action or improvement. The CQC also said that “the trust must ensure they deploy sufficient, suitably qualified midwifery staff across all areas of the service. Regulation 18 (1).” The latest CQC report is much better. The rating is now good. We have been told that Liverpool Women’s is now fully staffed with midwives. We will follow up on this with the hospital to see how this tallies with the Channel 4 report on staffing.

Young women have mobilised in the past and will mobilise again.

We want the Maternity, Gynaecology, fertility, genetics and neonatal services to remain as a whole with the full team at Crown Street.

We want enough funding and staffing to improve the experience of birth and treatment at the hospital for women, babies, and staff. Seventy-seven thousand people have signed our petition, on paper and online. The petition is still growing. We campaign for improved Maternity services across the country. We say that Birthrate+ is not enough. We demand much better NHS staffing, especially in midwifery and neonatal care. Channel 4 has revealed the state of nurse and midwife staffing in the NHS and LS; staff are diverted for daily emergencies, breaking the minimum even within tight essential staffing levels.

The national picture for Maternity is cause for serious concern and should be cause for action from any serious politician, any concerned woman. The BMJ said, “The number of women dying in the UK during or soon after pregnancy has increased to levels not seen since 2003-05, latest figures show“

MBRRACE reported in 2024, “There was a statistically significant increase in the overall maternal death rate in the UK between 2017-19 and 2020-22. This increase remained statistically significant when deaths due to COVID-19 were excluded, which suggests a concerning trend independent of COVID-19 specific deaths.“

In 2020-22 there were 13.41 deaths in every 100 000 maternities,1 significantly higher than the maternal death rate of 8.79 deaths per 100 000 in 2017-19 and similar to 2003-05 (13.95 per 100 000). The CQC inspected all the Maternity services across the country.

“The safety of Maternity services remains a key concern, with no services inspected as part of our inspection programme rated as outstanding for being safe. Almost half (47%) were rated as requires improvement for the safe key question, while 35% were rated as good and 18% were rated as inadequate. Where we had the most concerns, we used our enforcement powers to require trusts to make significant improvements to protect people from risk of harm.

Channel 4 figures show that while the Liverpool Royal is short of 4% of nurses in all wards and 17% in Critical Care, Liverpool Women’s is short of 20%, which is equivalent to being short one nurse in every five. and 17% of midwives. Aintree is short 18% of nurses and 10% in critical care. Alder Hey Hospital is short 30% of neonatal nurses. The trust must ensure that it deploys sufficient, suitably qualified midwifery staff across all areas of the service.
Regulation 18 (1)

As members of the public, campaigners attended board meetings and have never seen this staffing problem made clear in the papers. However, until the merger with the Royal Aintree and Broadgreen, fill rates for the different wards were reported in the board papers. This item of reporting must be reinstated in the new board papers. We have been told that Liverpool Women’s is fully staffed with midwives. We will follow up with the hospital.

The meeting about the hospital’s future.

The process underway to decide what happens to Maternity, Gynaecology, Neonatal services, fertility and genetics in Liverpool formally started in 2024 with “engagement” with the public. When the NHS makes significant changes to NHS services, the Integrated Care Board ( the current decision makers for the NHS in Cheshire and Merseyside) have to go through an engagement process, which they have done, then report on the engagement process and get permission from the board to proceed to put their plans to the public in a Consultation process. This engagement report will be received at the next ICB. The next ICB meeting is due to happen on March 27th, 2025, at the Events Hall, The Heath Business and Technical Park, Runcorn, WA7 4QX, from 9 am. The first half hour is to answer public questions.

This meeting with Ian Byrne MP voted 100% to save Liverpool Women’s Hospital.

Women and Children

Let’s build a movement to defend and improve Maternity services, fertility services, control over our fertility, and demand better healthcare for women.

Why? In the 20th century, women fought long and hard for safety in giving birth for mothers and babies, but now things are going backwards. Maternity units have been closed, and are being closed. There is a severe shortage of midwives, and no effective workforce plan is in place to address the problem. There are thousands of women out there who have midwifery training and have given up, either too broke, too tired, too fed up or outraged at the conditions for the women they care for. Both Infant and maternal mortality have risen significantly during Austerity, while governments have been cutting services, starving the NHS of vital resources and letting poverty soar. But never mind the women and kids; the rich have been doing very well.

Build a movement demanding better health and healthcare for our children, whose health is suffering.

“the rise in infant mortality means that UK is now ranked 30 out of 49 OECD countries – well behind other European countries except Bulgaria, Romania and Slovakia.”

Research shows that about 4-5% of women develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after giving birth – equivalent to approximately 25,000-30,000 women every year in the UK. Studies have also found that a much larger number of women – as many as one in three – find some aspects of their birth experience traumatic.

“Investing in the early years is one of the most important things we can do as a society to build a better future and promote the nation’s health, well-being and prosperity. There is clear evidence that such investment will be cost-effective in enabling future adults to live long and productive lives.” 

People Power can save the NHS if we make the politicians listen. Things start to change when ordinary people make time to speak to each other, including their unions, workmates and colleagues, other mothers at the school gates, families, their organisations, clubs, and elected representatives. Women have fought back since the Suffragettes, the Match Girls, the women of Fords in Speke, when they fought for equal pay, since the fight for abortion rights, and the many, many times women have fought for good Maternity care.