Tag: maternal-health

Liverpool Women’s Hospital Update
The Mother Statue at Liverpool Women’s Hospital

What’s happening now, in December 2025, with the plans for Liverpool Women’s Hospital? What is happening at Liverpool Women’s Hospital is part of a great set of problems in the NHS. Battered and damaged as the NHS is, it is still very necessary and much worth saving, for all our mothers, daughters, sisters, friends and lovers and every baby. “As we go marching, marching, we battle too for men, for they are women’s children, and we mother them again“

We stand with NHS workers and thank them for keeping the service going despite the appalling policies from this and recent governments.

Investing in healthcare gives great returns to any country in terms of health and wealth. We ask every reader to help us fight to repair, restore, and rebuild the NHS and Liverpool Women’s Hospital.

Grow our petition! It’s got 84,000+ signatures online and on paper. More will help – it gives the campaign a louder voice with the decision makers. No more Maternity cuts! We need more midwives! Fund Maternity and Gynaecology well across the nation.

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

We campaign in Cheshire and Merseyside, and many other campaigns are working in different areas. The voices for the NHS and Maternity are growing louder and louder. Please amplify these voices.

Latest news

The ICB (Integrated Care Board ) is the governing body of the NHS in each area. Ours is the Cheshire and Merseyside ICB.

Waiting outside the ICB meeting

At the ICB meeting on November 27th, 2025, which campaigners attended (as members of the public), we were told that the item was not to be discussed, neither publicly nor privately. We had sent written questions. They replied:

“Unfortunately, due to a number of other urgent items which require immediate discussion, the Women’s Hospital Services in Liverpool item will now not be
included on the agenda for this month’s private Board meeting, and will instead be rescheduled.“

“When it takes place, the private Board discussion will be focussed on how we move forward with the programme, taking into account the extensive options
work that took place over the summer, and will not involve making final decisions about how services might look in the future.”

We had asked in a written question whether the ICB would be discussing the costs for relocation versus staying at Crown Street, as seen in the hospital papers. The additional cost of keeping the dedicated services on Crown Street was described as approximately £6million extra per year. The cost of a rebuild was defined as“up to £336 m- £ 549m“. We pointed out that it would take up to 91 years for rebuilding to be cheaper than providing safe care at Crown Street.

This campaign would like to know what was involved in “the extensive options work that took place over the summer.” We would like to know who was involved in these options and where they were reported, because we cannot find them reported in either the ICB or the hospital board meetings. Why the need for secrecy? Why not involve concerned members of the public? We wrote and asked to be involved in these discussions and were refused. The NHS is not a private corporation; much as some rich companies would like to acquire it, it is still a public body founded by the people, paid for by the people and staffed by the people.

The ICB also said they would still discuss it in private when the item returned to the agenda. We were told there would be some news in the new year. We have also been promised meetings with the ICB chair and the Hospital Group CEO, so we might find out more.

The future of Liverpool Women’s Hospital remains uncertain. What is certain is that Maternity, nationally and locally, must be better funded. It is summed up in a simple fact that we need more midwives.

There is a reluctance in the NHS to say that underfunding and understaffing, too few midwives, and too few hospital beds are core problems. Well, we will say it for them.

Since the 2016 discussion about the future of Liverpool Women’s Hospital, there have been suggestions that it would be rebuilt near the new Royal. Many people still believe this. We neither believe that it will be rebuilt nor support rebuilding it. The Crown Street site is a good building. The staff are a good team with a global reputation. The women and babies of Liverpool need and love that hospital.

Many other Maternity services nationally operate in appalling buildings. The Health Service Journal reported that” Many Maternity and newborn units are at ‘serious risk of imminent breakdown’, regularly hit by leaks and floods, and too cramped to provide the necessary care, an official NHS England report admits. There was a detailed report published by the NHS about this last year. The poor buildings should be rebuilt, not Liverpool Women’s Hospital. Many other hospitals urgently need a rebuild, but the plans for that are delayed.

Improvements at Liverpool Women’s Hospital

There were reports last year that a deteriorating patient’s team was being developed at Liverpool Women’s Hospital, and we hope that this is now in place. This is much needed. Other improvements are in place, including bringing the “soft facilities management services” (cleaners, porters, etc.) back in-house. The Case for Change states that “As part of elective recovery funding, £5m has been provided to establish the Liverpool Women’s Hospital site as a centre for gynaecology procedures. This includes four state-of-the-art procedure rooms developed to free up capacity in theatres and create additional clinic space for more minor operations, and will enable up to 4,200 additional gynaecology procedures every year. In addition, Crown Street now hosts a community diagnostics centre with CT (computed tomography) and MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) from 8am to 8pm, and urgent access to CT 24/7, which has delivered improved access to scans and reduced transfers for these diagnostic tests.

From an exhibition at the celebration of 30years at Crown Street, (Our Photograph)

The CQC report in August 2025 stated that Liverpool Women’s Hospital has improved.

“Karen Knapton, CQC deputy director of operations in the north west, said:  “We were pleased to see that leaders and staff working in Maternity services at Liverpool Women’s Hospital had acted on our feedback from the previous inspection and worked hard to make improvements. Women and people using this service now had a much safer and improved experience of their care and treatment. Behind this was an improvement in how well-led the service was, which in turn supported staff to provide better care.

“For example, it was positive to hear that leaders had improved staffing levels. Women using the service told us there were enough staff to meet their needs, and they were treated with compassion and kindness. It was great to see this reflected in a recent people experience survey, which found 94% of women felt they were treated with respect and dignity.

“Overall, the Maternity team at Liverpool Women’s Hospital should be proud of the improvements our inspection found. They should use them as a foundation to keep building on.”

We applaud these improvements. Nowhere does the CQC mention relocation, nor have earlier, less complimentary CQC reports mentioned this.

Underfunding and understaffing have caused severe damage to mothers, babies and staff. More has been paid in damages from the service than has been spent on the whole national Maternity service.

Scandalously, “the potential cost of Maternity negligence claims in England since 2019 has reached £27.4 billion, which significantly exceeds the estimated £18 billion budget allocated to Maternity care over the same period“. We say improve the services and reduce the damage! When will the government focus on the needs of mothers and babies?? The voices of women and their families must be even louder on these issues.

Co-location has not been a success for maternity. It is not the only problem, far from it. Cuts and underfunding have been a disaster.

The “Case for Change” also says, “All other specialist centres for gynaecology and Maternity services in England have co-located acute and emergency hospital services.” We say that this co-location of Maternity in general hospitals has not proved to be a cure-all for Maternity crises, far from it. Maternity, despite being based in acute and general hospitals, is in crisis.

Although a standalone site, Liverpool is not one of the 14 Maternity providers involved in the so-called “rapid” national investigation of Maternity and newborn baby care across England. The Labour Government promised a rapid enquiry, but this enquiry is now not reporting before Christmas and might report sometime in the new year, and will not hear from bereaved parents.

Fourteen general hospitals ARE included in the national Maternity crisis, and others have been the site of some of the Maternity scandals. The Shropshire Okendon enquiry indicated that the management did not give Maternity due attention, nor did the Morecombe Bay hospital management give Maternity due attention, even after the big report.

It’s not just Maternity that is suffering in the NHS.

The women’s hospital reflects the many problems besetting our healthcare system. Books have been, and will be, written about this. We are trying to change the situation. These are the core issues.

  1. For many years now, the NHS has been underfunded and understaffed compared to other countries, and this has been a clear government policy.
  2. The organisation of the NHS has been damaged by pro-market legislation, especially the 2012 and 2022 Acts, which set hospitals up to compete against each other and allow for-profit interests to have a much greater say. Lord Darzi, in his report for the incoming Labour Government, described the 2012 Act as a“calamity without international precedent” that “proved disastrous”. For Liverpool Women’s Hospital, it meant that cooperation between hospitals proved very difficult, and the high cost of the foundation trust system was too much to bear. Not keeping to an impossible budget made them constantly under pressure.
  3. Maternity and gynaecology, across the country, suffered badly, with one in six Maternity units closing, and standards deteriorating. A major Maternity crisis developed with standards and staffing suffering, resulting in damage to mothers and babies.

What were the greater issues that pushed the Liverpool Women’s Hospital to the back of the agenda? They were hugely based on funding, cuts and the winter crisis. We will write about them in another article soon.

“You get one chance to deliver a baby safely. There are no reruns or repeats. The accoucher must get it right every time. To do so, the midwife must be supported by her colleagues, midwifery management and work within a fully safe environment. Alas, with the fragmentation of our NHS, top-down draconian management, our mothers, their babies and our midwives are given short shift, and they become the victims of often tragic circumstances. There is a woeful shortage of skilled midwives. Anyone can deliver a baby, but it takes a skilled midwife to do so day in day out safely and with professional accountability,” from our campaigner Stephanie (below)

Campaigner Stephanie, one of the generation of midwives who say they worked in the golden age of the NHS. We fight for another golden age. Join us

Press Statement on plans for Liverpool Women’s hospital and healthcare for women and babies in our region.

Save Liverpool Women’s Hospital 2024 for all our mothers, sisters, daughters, friends, and lovers and for all the babies.

The ICB meets on Wednesday, October 9th, to discuss its latest attempt to close Liverpool Women’s Hospital.

Without the long and publicly promised consultation, the ICB has gone ahead, determined to close our much-needed hospital.

Our campaign rejects any attempts to close, merge, disperse or cut services for the women and babies of the whole area.  None of the half-suggestions in the papers will improve anything for women or babies.

Papers such as those published for the meeting on October 9th are impossible to evaluate without a financial statement, research background, and impact assessment, all missing from the proposals.

The financial background for the whole NHS is grim. The last government’s financial plans and policies are still in place. The ICB in Liverpool is in serious financial trouble. There is a looming winter crisis. NHS England has said that the trusts must squeeze staff costs, and there is no chance to surge extra beds and social care resources as they did last year. We have consistently challenged the ICB on this.

Liverpool Women’s has structural financial problems. The largest maternity service in the country is most impacted by the inadequate Maternity tariff. Financial problems are not mentioned in the paperwork. No other hospital can improve on the Liverpool Women’s Hospital maternity service without improved funding.

Liverpool Women’s Hospital needs a level 3 high dependency unit added to its  Intensive Care provisions, and it needs some more specialist staff, all of which would be more efficient and equitable than the current semi-proposals.

We will not stand by and see women’s services sacrificed again.

In 2015, plans were set out to close one Hospital in Liverpool, and they chose to damage services to women.

Liverpool Women’s Hospital’s financial problems are caused by the poor funding of maternity nationally, and the cost of the foundation trust system.

Maternity and women’s health need urgent changes, but these don’t include dispersing services and absorbing Liverpool Women’s Hospital into one giant conglomerate. 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, the chaos of the building of the new Royal, and the move towards an American healthcare model. We have seen more than a decade of damage.

The priority must be the health and well-being of the women and babies of Liverpool. For too long, women and babies have paid the brutal price of austerity and poverty.

The ICB say they think it will help poor and black women to move a hospital from Crown Street, in one of the most hard-up areas of the city, and the traditional Black centre of the city! This within weeks of the most serious organised racist attacks in the city in decades.

We have always said hospitals should work cooperatively, rejecting the 2012 Health and Social Care Act competition model.

75,000 people have signed the petition to save Liverpool Women’s Hospital. There have been  three large rallies, and countless meetings and street stalls on this issue.

Only the hard and skilled work of NHS workers and in this case especially, midwives, have kept a service afloat.

Restore and repair the NHS! Save Liverpool Women’s Hospital!

Liverpool Women’s Hospital is a much valued service for women and babies.  The history of the building and the site are important, especially as racism has reared it head in Liverpool in a way unseen for decades.  It is a modern low-rise building in good condition. No wonder the private sector lusts after it.  The Crown Street site is, importantly, a green site, which helps sick women and babies heal, which is good for babies’ lungs, and is a good place to be born.

Nationally, Maternity is badly funded and badly organised. The Government spend more on payouts from the insurance than for the whole service. There has been a flight of older, more experienced midwives from the service, making the work of our much-valued younger midwives harder. Midwives nationally have been clear about the dangers, and a slew of reports have shown the damage done to women and babies. All these cases have been in co-located maternity systems.

NHS workforce planning has been appalling in the last decade. Blaming a standalone site for workforce shortage is ridiculous. The situation for anaesthetist training is a national scandal.

We call on the city of Liverpool, Merseyside, and beyond 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.

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

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.

Make a mark for maternity in the general election.
https://amandagreavette.com/birth-project-gallery/#masonry

Save Liverpool Women’s Hospital, the national maternity service, and women’s and babies’ healthcare. While we fight for Liverpool Women’s Hospital, we fight also 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.”

Together ordinary women and men can make a difference, and can put huge pressure on the government to improve our services and maintain that improvement. We cannot leave it to election promises, especially as neither main party at present is supporting the full restoration of the NHS.

The NHS is seen as the most important issue in the forthcoming General election.

Our campaign focuses on Liverpool Women’s Hospital. So, we asked local pregnant women for their thoughts.

“I think the most basic thing that women giving birth need is to feel safe, and to be able to have confidence and trust in the people who care for them before, during and after the birth of their baby. Continuity of care is so important, and while this is challenging to deliver, this should be the goal wherever possible. The Women’s has suffered some serious problems in the recent past, and work needs to be done to restore trust and confidence for the women and families who rely on this vital service. Women need to be able to access midwifery-led care, and be supported in their choices around birth and beyond. I want to feel secure that I will be offered treatments that will be beneficial (nothing unnecessary), that the midwives and doctors will listen to me and answer my questions, that they will seek my consent before they intervene, and that the quality of care and communication will be consistently of a high standard. I have experienced both excellent care and coercive and traumatic care at the Women’s in the past. I understand that there are serious system pressures that affect staff throughout the trust, but no woman should leave the postnatal ward feeling traumatised and vulnerable. Staff need all the support and training necessary to ensure this does not happen. Research demonstrates that birth trauma is a national problem, and I would like to see the Women’s taking a leading role in addressing this silent epidemic. As a tertiary centre and leader in obstetrics and foetal maternal medicine, the Women’s should be setting standards, not struggling to meet them.”

Another comment was:

“We need more focus on women with complex social needs as they have terrible experiences once they go in to deliver.”

We agree and say.

  • Fight to save and improve Liverpool Women’s Hospital.
  • Restore and Repair the whole NHS.

We need a national health service, funded at least as well as other European Countries, publicly provided, not for profit, available to all humans in the country, free at the point of need. This model is the safest and most economical model of healthcare. The US have a dog’s dinner of a healthcare model but it costs much more than the NHS and has many more preventable deaths.

The UK does not spend enough on our healthcare and wastes billions on private profits.

If UK spending per person had matched the average across the EU14 during the decade, then UK total spending per year would have averaged £227bn between 2010 and 2019 – £40bn higher than actual average annual spending. Matching spending per head to France or Germany would have led to an additional £40bn and £73bn (21% to 39% increase respectively) of total health spending each year.

Governments know this and choose to involve big US corporations in the NHS so they can make a fortune, as our service runs on empty. The years of closures and mergers have done great harm and the last thing we need is more health care corporations to rip us off.

The U.S. has the lowest life expectancy at birth, the highest death rates for avoidable or treatable conditions, the highest maternal and infant mortality, and among the highest suicide rates. The U.S. has the highest rate of people with multiple chronic conditions and an obesity rate nearly twice the OECD average.

The years of closures and mergers have done great harm. In August 2023 a report said that “roughly 81 hospitals closed in the past 21 months, 6.6% of total hospitals.” 

Liverpool Women’s Hospital requires about 25% more funding. This is because eighty per cent of its work is maternity, and maternity is badly funded nationally. However, funding for the whole ICB (NHS) in Merseyside and Cheshire is also a problem. One of the hospitals that cannot safely work within the given budget is Liverpool Women’s Hospital. The Board of Liverpool Women’s Hospital has set a budget for safety and must be supported in this.

The Cheshire and Merseyside Integrated Care Board provides the bulk of funds to the hospital with a small amount coming nationally from funding for specialist services. The ICB in turn gets its funding from NHS England. NHS England funds maternity through what they call the maternity tariff. This maternity tariff is inadequate for safe care. NHS England gets its funding from the Government. The buck stops with the Government.

The ICB said it has serious funding issues in its most recent report;

“Colleagues will be aware that the financial planning round for 2024-2025 has yet to be concluded. This is largely because provider financial plans [providers are the Hospitals and non-hospital trusts our comment] exceed the level of funding available and we remain in an iterative process [iterative means going back and forth] with NHS England as we seek to find the right balance between further cost improvements [cost improvements means cuts] and maintaining the core quality of services.
5.2 At the time of writing this report we were forecasting a deficit for the year in the order of c£150million (2.24% of turnover). We will be able to report back to Board verbally at its meeting in May [This meeting was cancelled].”

Sadly, Maternity does not feature in the priorities of the ICB despite reporting that many more women experienced a delay in induction of labour. This means that a woman has been told that her baby needs to be born soon and has come into hospital, to have the baby and then is kept waiting (and worrying) for more than 12 hours.

The NHS came from campaigns over many years from ordinary people, from trade unions in mining towns and working-class women’s organisations especially the Cooperative Women’s Guild who left behind a great record of their work in 1916 in the book ‘Maternity: Letters from Working Women, Collected by the Women’s Co-operative Guild’. Eventually, Nye Bevan founded the NHS as part of the 1945 Labour Government. It dramatically improved women’s survival giving birth, and the survival of babies.

Linked problems.

Women and children have been hardest hit by austerity and this has affected our health The prospects are grim indeed. In Liverpool “The life expectancy of women will fall by one year, and they will be in good health for 4.1 fewer years than they are currently. Although they are starting from a lower base, men will live 6 months longer than currently, and more of that time – 1.8 years – will be spent in good health.

Tell everyone who wants your vote to commit to real improvements in maternity services, a real commitment to the NHS. But do not leave it to MPs, get involved in the campaign to restore the full NHS and Maternity care. Suffragettes did not have a voice in parliament but they made themselves heard. We can campaign as well as our great-grandmothers.

Save Liverpool Women’s Hospital. No mergers, no dispersal of services. We need more midwives. Fund all the maternity hospitals well. Staff them well. Staff should not be pulled from ward to ward just to manage day-to-day demands. Each ward should be well-staffed. Fund postnatal support. Fund safety-critical improvements. Fund and staff the specialist work of Liverpool Women’s Hospital. Make treatment timely and safe, without long waits for induction of labour. Make maternity services improve women’s mental health not damage it.

We need more midwives, and midwives need a professionally safe workload and good pay. It is hard to stay focused professionally if you are not sure where the next meal or heating bill is coming from or if you are working extra shifts to make ends meet.

Find out more about maternity here

Every life starts at birth.

As the suffragettes said

“Do not appeal, do not beg, do not grovel. Take courage, join hands, stand beside us, fight with us.”

It takes a weird level of cruelty to cut services for the birth of a baby but that is what has happened. Our campaign is far from alone in raising these issues. The government knows quite well what is happening in maternity. Multiple national reports have shown the crisis in maternity services for mothers and babies. These are some of the reports, all reported to Parliament.

1. Care Quality Commission,

2. Donna Ockendon,

3. Bill Kirkup

4. Morecombe Bay,

5. Maternity Services in England House of Commons Health and Social Care Committee

6. Birth Trauma report

7. Report into the quality and safety of  maternity services

8. Saving Babies Lives Report

The government responded with endless cuts to the NHS budgets. This year’s funding allocation for the NHS in real terms, taking into account inflation, is the worst in many years.

Improving maternity outcomes needs to be everyone’s business. Let us make it our business.

There are other NHS problems. Mental health care has been sliced, diced and privatised. Dentistry is simply unavailable to many people; GP services are in serious trouble through underfunding and crazy schemes to reduce our contact with a GP. Meanwhile, reports show that having contact with the same GP adds years to our lives

The service must respect and work with mothers. There should be continuity of care, not an impersonal production line.

Eradicate racism from the maternity service.

https://amandagreavette.com/birth-project-gallery/#masonry

Fund the whole NHS.

No cuts or closures.

Raise the funding paid to all hospitals for maternity.

Raise the Birthrate plus staffing standards.

Protect and improve mother and baby health.

We support campaigns for the safety of mothers and babies in other ways.

You can take action now for the NHS as we enter the election campaign Send these questions to your candidates.

Join our campaign. Spread the word.

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

“I incite this meeting to rebellion!”

This blog post comes from a speech at a meeting held at the Quaker Meeting House Liverpool on Monday 11th March, 2024, for International Women’s Day. Other speeches were about child poverty, NHS privatisation, the situation in the big hospitals in Liverpool, and the situation for Hospitals in Gaza. We will publish those speeches too.

Mrs Pankhurst ended a famous meeting with the words “I incite this meeting to Rebellion!”. We follow in the footsteps of campaigning women over the years as we fight for maternity care, for the NHS, for women’s rights and against poverty.

We are campaigning for safe, respectful healthcare and maternity care for all women and babies. Giving birth can be a truly wonderful experience.

The wonderful artist amandagreavette shows us how wonderful birth can be.

“We meet here in Liverpool to mark International Working Women’s Day 2024. We meet to salute the women who have fought and won much in the past, to send sisterly greetings to all women around the world especially to those in struggle, those in war, and those damaged by the climate crises.

I want to talk about women’s health and maternity, locally, nationally and internationally. No one is safe until we all are safe. Change is possible. In living memory, we have seen huge improvements nationally and globally. In more recent memory we have seen significant damage done to these services again both nationally and globally, but the damage is most severe where government policies of Austerity or “Restructuring” have been imposed. Restructuring is what  Austerity is called in the Global South when countries are forced by the IMF to cut services because economic problems drive them to turn to it for aid.

“Between 2014-18 resources spent on public services dropped by more than 18 per cent in Latin America and the Caribbean, and by 15 per cent in Sub-Saharan Africa. Looking ahead, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) predicts that this trend will continue in all regions.”

It is always the women who carry the weight of such cuts and this is reflected in maternal deaths and infant mortality. Sadly, for the UK, we have experienced some of the worst damage amongst the richest countries. But as Governments imposed that damage, governments could repair and restore that damage. Meanwhile, it is our babies, our women who pay the price.

I will look in a minute at the most damning figures, those showing the deaths of mothers and of babies. We mark these deaths with respect and will both mourn and organise to improve this situation.

Our World in Data says “For most of human history, around 1 in 2 newborns died before reaching the age of fifteen. By 1950, that figure had declined to around one-quarter globally. By 2020, it had fallen to 4%. But while humanity has made much progress, there is still a lot of work to do.”

Look at the figures for infant mortality at birth. Twenty-seven other countries have better figures than ours, yet ours is one of the richest countries globally.

“The UK is fifth from the bottom among 27 European countries for infant mortality. The rate stalled in the UK between 2013 and 2018 at 3.9 per one thousand live births. In England and Wales, the rate is more than twice as high in the most deprived areas (5 per one thousand) compared with the least deprived areas (2.7 per one thousand).” (4 Mar 2020)

The latest figures from MBRRACE-UK (who report on maternal and baby deaths in the UK over time) show that the number of women dying in the UK during or soon after pregnancy has increased to levels not seen since 2003-05.

In 2020-22 there were 13.41 deaths in every 100 000 maternities, 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).

We stop for a minute to mourn the death of two African women at Liverpool Women’s Hospital.

We do not accept the term “cultural bias.” It is racism and it must end. We recognise the increased risk for Black and Asian women in the maternity services as they are working today. We mourn these sisters and we will fight on to repair these terrible damages. We will be difficult to the government and to the NHS bosses in their names.

Internationally

Globally, every day in 2020, approximately eight hundred women died from preventable causes related to pregnancy and childbirth – meaning that a woman dies around every two minutes.

South Sudan had 1223 deaths per 100,000 women giving birth.

Belarus has 1.1 deaths per 100,000 women giving birth.

The UK has 13.41 deaths in every 100,000 women giving birth.

“In 2020-22 there were 13.41 deaths in every 100,000 maternities, 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).”

Statistics released by MBRRACE-UK show that the maternal death rate in the UK has increased significantly over the past few years. Between January 2020 and December 2022, the rate was 13.41 per 100,000 maternities, up 53% from 8.79 per 100,000 in the previous three-year period from 2017-2019. This rate is the highest it has been in almost 20 years.

This is worse than Albania and Turkmenistan, yet this country has one of the largest economies in the world, and we used to have the best healthcare system in the world. The UK is fifth from the bottom among 27 European  Countries for infant mortality

The situation is so serious that parents of babies who died or who were injured in maternity care are demanding a public enquiry. There have been many detailed and authoritative reports, often commissioned by the Government or by Parliament, on maternity services, but the government response has been appalling.

Maternity safety matters; building national links.

We are working with other campaigns including Keep our NHS Public with whom we have produced this fact sheet. We would be delighted to hear from other campaigns with whom we have not yet made contact.

We say that this government does not care about maternity deaths, does not care about the poor experience of giving birth, that poor funding and poor staffing numbers inflict on women. The government does not care about, indeed prides itself, on women’s poverty. Let me emphasise that. This is not governmental ignorance. The government are not ignorant of the damage they have done and are doing. It is a conscious choice. The Government have all the reports, they commissioned some of the reports, they have the evidence and they choose not to act to ameliorate the situation. It prefers to serve the very rich. It would rather pay damages for babies damaged at birth than sort the situation out. The cost of compensating mothers and their families for harm caused by NHS maternity services is more than double what the health service spends on such care each year, analysis shows.

This situation is manageable, and it could be changed. Money invested in patient care and staffing leads to a richer economy, not a poorer economy.

Change is possible and change is necessary.

While we mourn our dead, it is also important to consider the lesser injuries, and the other bad experiences women and babies are enduring because of the state of the service and because of poverty inflicted by Austerity. These damages are real and important whether we are talking of physical or mental injury. This situation could be repaired. Neither deaths nor lesser injuries are inevitable.

Save Liverpool Women’s Hospital Camapign is far from alone in calling out the damage being done. There are a host of charities and the Royal College of Midwives making the same point.

The Royal College of Midwives (RCM) is calling out the Government’s record on maternity funding which leaves some NHS trusts and boards basing midwifery staffing levels on what they can afford, not on women and baby’s needs.

Birte Harlev-Lam, Executive Director, Midwife at the RCM said: “Women and their safety are still not being put at the centre of care. If this were the case, we would see significant amounts of additional funding and real efforts to support, retain and recruit staff, and we are not. There is a black hole in the centre of our maternity services where more money and staff should be. I have no doubt this is undermining maternity staff efforts to deliver the safest and best possible care for women and their babies.

Some avoidable maternal deaths and maternal injuries are due to NHS understaffing, under equipment and understaffing. There is another factor in these deaths. The extreme inequality in the UK, and the cruel impact of austerity on women and on women’s health, on children and on children’s health arising from government policies and priorities, also affect maternal and infant mortality. Poverty causes extreme stress, poor nutrition, poor housing and poor health. Poor mental health after birth leads to deaths, especially amongst the poor, and Black women, yet maternal mental health services are badly damaged, and health visitor numbers have not recovered from the pandemic.

The impact on staff wellbeing, on workload and staff retention is also important. Working under constant pressure is extremely damaging to the health of staff. Neither giving birth, nor having treatment for Gynaecological issues, is routine or ordinary. It is staff vigilance that leads to safety. How someone can be vigilant at the end of a very busy 13-hour shift is beyond me. Many people working in the NHS do not feel free to speak out, and those running the show, plod on making the cuts or CIPS without informing the public of the damage being done, nor describing the damage done in earlier years of austerity.

“This is all having an impact on the safety and quality of care for women and also means many women with more complex needs such as mental health problems are not getting the care they need and deserve. This is also leaving staff exhausted, overwhelmed, fragile and feeling massively undervalued” warns the Royal College of Midwives.

Maternity is underfunded and hospitals are not even spending what the government allocate to maternity (according to the RCN) because they can’t balance their books without using that money for other things.

There is an ongoing shortage of midwives. The BBC reports a shortage of about 2,500 midwives on the ratios that the Government describes as safe for maternity care. We would say that these Government figures for provision of midwives are themselves too low for what is required. So, 2,500 is the minimum extra required.

Our struggle is part of the campaign to restore the NHS, to renationalise it, to turn it once again into a publicly delivered, comprehensive, national service, to make it safer for women and babies. Our campaign is part of the campaign for safety in maternity, part of the campaign for better pay and conditions for staff. It is also part of the campaign for women’s rights, and intrinsic to the rights of women are the rights of the child.

Inequality and poverty affect women’s health and the health of their children.

Campaigning in the street

There are fourteen million children (aged up to 18) in the UK. Reports this week drew out the terrible extent of childhood poverty in the UK. Meghan Meek-O’Connor, senior child poverty policy adviser at Save the Children UK, said: “Today 4.3 million children are being failed. It is an outrage that 100,000 more children are in poverty – they are being forgotten.

Britain in the 1970s was one of the most equal of rich countries. Today, it is the second most unequal, after the US (27 Nov 2023).

Stewart Lansley, the author of The Richer, the Poorer and The Cost of Inequality, said it was “an acute paradox of contemporary capitalism that as societies get more prosperous, rising numbers are unable to afford the most basic of material and social needs.” He also said: “In Britain, child poverty has doubled in 40 years. Yet few modern tycoons go without private jets, luxury yachts, even private islands.”

In a meeting in Liverpool recently  it was reported that;

“Inequality has no more powerful expression than in children’s health, and children in our region get a particularly bad deal,” before pointing out that Liverpool’s infant mortality rate remains above the national average and that, every year, around twenty-six infants in the city do not reach their first birthday.

They reveal how poor health in mothers of the next generation can lead to ingrained health inequalities, adding: “Babies born small or early because of poor maternal health have the worst possible start to life and a health trajectory which culminates in a shorter life expectancy and more years lived in ill health.”

For those babies who survive, there is an uncertain future ahead with current trends predicting that by 2040, Liverpudlians will live more than a quarter of their lives in ill health.”

Keeping kids in uniform and shoes is hard enough.

Our campaign will fight on about this as well as fighting for the restoration of the NHS.

Poverty amongst women.

“Women living on low incomes in England are at increased risk of experiencing poor health during pregnancy. Our recent review of the evidence found that women and babies living with socioeconomic disadvantages had a 40% increased risk of worse pregnancy outcomes including stillbirth, low birth weight and babies being born early. Women may also experience mental health issues following pregnancy, birth or in the first year after birth. Women with lower access to financial, educational, social and health resources engage less in care during pregnancy – called antenatal or maternity care.”

Mersey Pensioners fighting for fully qualified staff for all.

Save Liverpool Women’s Hospital Campaign started in 2015 to try to stop the closure of Liverpool Women’s Hospital. The assault on the NHS and on working class living standards was well under way by 2015 and closing one more hospital was small beer to the bureaucrats of the NHS and our city council at the time. We had already seen the scandal of Prince’s Park Medical Centre (See this article or this book for the history) and the fight to stop PFI in this city, so we were able to mobilise for Liverpool Women’s Hospital and to build our petition and awareness in the city. 

The banner of women who fought for healthcare more than a century ago. Their banner is in the Museum of Liverpool Life. Solidarity to the staff who are now on strike.

 Liverpool Women’s Hospital is still here, still short of money and staff, and still threatened with merger, dispersal, and de facto closure. We will publish a more detailed report on the situation for Liverpool Women’s Hospital shortly.

We saw enormous improvements in infant mortality and maternal mortality following the introduction of the NHS. We can see such improvements once again if the NHS is reinstated.

So, we will persist, as women do.

We send special greetings to the Home Based Women Workers’ Trade Union of Pakistan with whom we have exchanged greetings each year of our campaign. They have built a powerful trade union amongst women who work at home in various trades. They inspire us to continue in our campaign. We send greetings to the women working to unionise the uranium mines in  Namibia. We send greetings to women around the world fighting for better maternity care.

As always we look to how women in the past have won gains  in rights and services, we remember the women who fought for the vote, the women who fought for baby clinics and maternity care and contraception here in Liverpool, the women of the sixties and seventies who fought for women’s rights in childbirth, for those who fought for  women to be able to choose contraception  without their husbands permission, for abortion rights, for equal pay, with a special shout out to the machinists in Fords In Speke,  for women’s economic independence, for the end to the marriage bar in teaching and other jobs for the fight for the Women’s Hospital in London and many more

We campaign, we organise, we agitate, we consult,  we build links, we challenge and we demand. We can win but only as we grow ever bigger.

Save Liverpool Women’s Hospital for all our mothers, sisters, daughters, friends, and lovers and for every baby.

Please support our campaign Please sign our petition ( unless you have already signed)

lobbying the Integrated Care Board