Tag: news

Save Liverpool Women’s Hospital December 2024

What is happening with Liverpool Women’s Hospital in December 2024?

Liverpool Women’s Hospital is under a very serious and utterly ridiculous threat. Please see our suggestions here for how to support keeping the hospital open and better funded on Crown Street. This winter the Royal and Aintree are both overcrowded.

“Stables wanted for the birth of Liverpool babies when they close Liverpool Women’s Hospital”.

Imagine 7,000 babies and their mums and midwives crammed into the already overcrowded Royal? Will our babies be born on the corridors along with the very poorly people?

The fight goes on to Save Liverpool Women’s Hospital as a tertiary hospital on its own site run for women and babies. 76,000 people say so.

We are organising a public meeting with Kim Johnson MP in January and will continue with all the rest of our campaign work. Please help if you can. We especially want to talk to women’s organisations and union branches with big female membership

The future of Liverpool Women’s Hospital is in the balance. There is huge public support for keeping the hospital open and on the  Crown Street site, our petition both on line and on paper is growing steadily and is already more than 76,000 signatures.

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

It also found there to be a “clear lack of awareness and understanding of women’s reproductive health conditions among primary healthcare practitioners” and concluded that gynaecological care is not being treated as a priority.

Pervasive stigma associated with gynaecological and urogynaecological health, a lack of education and “medical misogyny” has contributed to poor awareness of these conditions.

In this situation the closure of the hospital that provides all of Liverpool’s gynaecology care is crazy.

 The maternity crisis nationally continues, yet they talk of closing our maternity hospital.

 We also keep asking “Where will our babies be born?”

 How can we keep a tertiary specialist hospital for women if they close the building, or scatter the services?

There are two big threats.

  1. The trust has formed a committee with Liverpool University Foundation Trust( The Royal Aintree and Broadgreen. We fear that the needs of women and babies will disappear as women’s health and maternity have been neglected in the other big hospitals. So far all the services remain at Crown Street. The first joint meeting has been held. We are not aware of a maternity expert being on this committee. Certainly, men dominate the leading positions.
  2. The ICB is a separate move that has finished an initial “public engagement “ over their plans to for the future of Liverpool Women’s Hospital. This is the first legal step towards closure or merger. We are preparing a detailed response to their plans. At all the public meetings the plans were robustly condemned.
  3. At the ICB board in November we asked
Lobbying the ICB

 “Re LWH & Women’s services, re the reporting process from the ‘engagements’ about the future of maternity and Gynaecology services in Liverpool Hospitals.

  1. Why was the ‘independent firm’ not at any of the events? If they are writing the report including those meetings they will only have the ICB reporting on themselves.
  2. How much is the firm getting paid & how much has it cost ICB staff time etc. for these events?
  3. What is the timetable for receiving the results of the report & next steps
  4. How will our petition be recognised by the engagement?

They answered.

  1. As per best practice with an engagement exercise of this sort, NHS Cheshire and Merseyside commissioned an independent organisation – Hood & Woolf – to design and host the engagement questionnaire, collate and analyse responses to it, and to undertake an analysis and report on the feedback across all the different strands of our engagement activity. The report will include a description of the engagement activity undertaken, a summary of the findings, and the key themes, ideas, issues and concerns that have been heard over the six-week period. Analysing data – especially when there are large quantities of qualitative feedback – is a specialist skill, and it is standard practice for us to bring in external specialist support to carry this out. Hood & Woolf’s role did not include collecting feedback at engagement events. This is a task routinely carried out by our inhouse team when we are undertaking public engagement, even when the analysis is being supported externally. There was a dedicated note-taker (a member of NHS Cheshire and Merseyside staff) for each of the tables at all events (for the two online events, which had fewer participants, there was a single note-taker who took all the feedback). Their role was to literally take notes of the conversation, not to interpret it in any way. Each original, full set of notes will be provided to Hood & Woolf for them to analyse key themes and areas of discussion, so that this can be summarised in the report. It is important to be clear that the events were only one way in which we were collecting feedback during the engagement. Participants at the events were reminded that even though they had attended an event, it was still important that they completed the main engagement questionnaire. A QR code taking people straight to the questionnaire, and printed versions for those who were not able to complete the questionnaire online, were made available at the events to support this.

Our response to this will be detailed in a later post but we do not think the note-taking was independent or sufficiently detailed.

  • How much is the firm getting paid & how much has it cost ICB staff time etc. for these events? The core costs for Hood & Woolf’s work are in the region of £24,000.We have not broken down the cost of ICB staff time for this engagement exercise – the work was led by our in-house communications and engagement team, and no additional staffing costs were incurred. However, this has been a significant piece of work for the team, and for others in the organisation, both in terms of planning and delivery. ICBs have a legal duty to involve people, and we are committed to allocating the level of time and resource that this requires. In addition, the Women’s Hospital Services in Liverpool programme is a key organisational priority, and it is critical that we carry out comprehensive engagement with our communities to inform the next stage of work.
  • What is the timetable for receiving the results of the report & next steps? Work to begin analysing the feedback we’ve received is already underway and will continue over the coming weeks, however it’s important to note that we are still in the process of compiling feedback (for example, questionnaires provided in languages other than English will need to be translated before they can be included). Publishing the report and sharing findings with those who took part in the engagement is an important part of the process, and we plan to do this once the report is finalised and taken through our governance meetings and process. We are likely to be ready to publish the report and details of next steps during March 2025, but we will provide further confirmation on this nearer the time. ( our emphasis)
  • How will our petition be recognised by the engagement? ( At the last public meeting, the petition was spoken about with disrespect.) The petition was raised and discussed on a number of occasions during the engagement events. We are aware of and have heard the strength of feeling and different views people have shared, and we are grateful for the contributions people have given to our discussions. As stated, the information recorded during table discussions will be analysed as part of the process of developing the engagement report. With regard to the petition itself, that too will be noted in the engagement report.
Will we need another big demonstration?

Please do all you can to help.

A broken engagement.

We fight for Liverpool Women’s Hospital and to Restore and Repair the NHS.

Day by day, the NHS provides services for patients often with great skill and good humour. Despite years of cuts, the NHS survives but it cannot provide all services we need because of austerity and the privatisation agenda.

We are in grim times, but the fightback is growing. Our petition has reached 76,000 signatures. We have had support to pay for our leaflets and meetings. People who spoke at the engagement meetings unanimously supported keeping Liverpool Women’s Hospital. Not a single member of the public spoke in favour of closing it, or dispersing its services. We have great support from the public, and two Liverpool MPs, Kim Johnson and Ian Byrne, have helped this week. The same day as the ICB meeting and the first joint board meeting of LUHFT and Liverpool Women’s Hospital, Kim Johnson raised the issue in Parliament. Ian Byrne sent a great letter to the Engagement Team, saying “NO!”.

However, the process decided by NHS bureaucrats rolls on. We can stop it if we organise.

The many people who have said “that will never happen” should join the fight back.

Two quotes show the seriousness of the threat we face

At the October 9th meeting of the ICB Fiona Lemens, leading the process said, introducing the engagement, “It’s too early in the process to speculate about how services might look, in the future at the Crown St. site and across the city, because we’ve not started that design work yet, but what we can say is that we need that hospital at Crown St. The things that we could consider that we currently need space for would be out patients, day case procedures. We’ve invested in a CDC, we need that diagnostic capacity for the patients in Liverpool, and this is an excellent building to provide that from and we are absolutely committed to NHS delivered services being delivered from that site, and there are no plans to discuss any other forms of services going in there.”

So, Fiona, where will our babies be born? Where will the women of Liverpool receive their gynaecology care? Where will fertility go? Where will genetics go?Where will the Bradford clinic go?

The website for Liverpool Women’s Hospital says about the second strand in this threat to the integrity of the Women’s Hospital, the largest maternity facility in the country :

“From 1 November 2024, Liverpool Women’s NHS Foundation Trust became part of NHS University Hospitals of Liverpool Group (UHLG). UHLG has been created through the coming together of Liverpool University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (LUHFT) and Liverpool Women’s NHS Foundation Trust (LWH).

Please note, Liverpool Women’s Hospital is now represented on the Group Board of Directors of NHS University Hospitals of Liverpool Group (UHLG). Details of past Liverpool Women’s NHS Foundation Trust public board meetings can still be accessed via the links below.“

On Thursday 28th November 2024, two crucial meetings happened. These meetings were:

1) The ICB meeting which received the first report of the Engagement process to decide the future of the Liverpool Women’s Hospital, discussed the winter crisis, and how to handle their lack of adequate funds. We, as members of the public, asked questions. We were told that the first response to the engagement would be reported in February or March. They are paying £24,000 to a company called Hood and Woolf to produce the report on the engagement.

We also learned of the grim financial position, and the situation regarding the terrible winter crisis, likely to be worse than last year. There will be a full report on this in a later post.

2) The inaugural meeting of a new joint committee, which has the delegated powers of the boards of Liverpool Women’s Hospital and the Liverpool University Hospital Foundation Trust (which covers the Royal, Aintree and Broadgreen). We fear that maternity will be treated as badly as maternity has been treated in so many other big acute hospitals, leading to major problems and major enquiries.

This joint committee of LUHT and LWH, also reported that the winter crisis is starting (staff tell us it started a while ago). They also discussed services that might be moved to, or from, the Crown Street site although such moves were already a fait acomplis, and the integrity of a Women’s Hospital seemed to be already lost.

We think it’s wrong that while the ICB follows a protocol to consult on service changes, the merging of the hospitals had no consultation whatsoever, and precious little discussion at the Liverpool Women’s Hospital Board. We were told at the engagement meetings, that merging hospitals does not need public consultation. This huge change was just ‘steamrollered’ through. Merging the Women’s is just the start. The intention is that the specialist hospitals in Liverpool, the Clatterbridge Centre, the Walton Centre and Broadgreen Heart and Chest, will be pulled into an even bigger merger. In contrast to LUHFT, the specialist hospitals have been funded nationally and do not share the financial crises facing LUHFT. It seems odd to us that such major reconfigurations are not considered to require public consultation, while (albeit cruel) changes to such things as celiac prescriptions do. At the ICB it was announced that they are going out to public consultation on whether prescriptions should still be available for gluten-free products for celiacs (A Gluten-free loaf can cost as much as £3.99.) We think this cut is terribly wrong for people already hard up, and struggling for enough food. Many celiacs don’t ask for prescriptions but the damage of this policy will hit the poorest hardest. The Celiac prescriptions cut is yet another cut amongst many – but surely, if this merits consultation, so must merging hospitals?).

Our campaign wants a well-staffed, well-funded Women’s Hospital on the Crown Street site. We want maternity to be funded and staffed well across the UK. We say enough of maternity scandals, enough of birth trauma, and enough of closures and cuts. We say this for all our mothers, daughters, sisters, friends, lovers, and babies. So many other countries do so much better than the UK in maternity and infant mortality. Once we were up with the best but austerity has damaged the service costing many of our babies’ and mothers’ lives, and women’s health.

We have 76,000 signatures on our petition to save Liverpool Women’s Hospital. People sent in many postcards opposing the idea of closure, or dispersal of services as set out in the engagement.

You can read more about the “engagement” process here from Greg Dropkin of Keep Our NHS Public.

We want to restore and repair the whole NHS, and to stop the relentless”Winter Crises”.

The NHS was founded to provide:

A national public service providing healthcare for all, free at the point of need, government-funded, publicly run, and publicly delivered, with well-qualified staff. For decades it worked very well, being declared the best health service in the world. Now it is seriously damaged and must be repaired.

The NHS came from decades of campaigning by working-class women, like the Cooperative Women’s Guild, and the Trade Unions, not from the rich and powerful. If we want to keep it we too fight for it.

The NHS has seen reorganisation after reorganisation in favour of the American model, most recently the Integrated Care Model. The ICB for our area is called Merseyside and Cheshire ICB. This body controls the allocation of money to the hospitals and policy over cuts. Cheshire and Merseyside ICB, and other ICBs simply do not have enough money to function properly. They were conceived as part of a hospital closure project, to reduce the costs of the service and make it more acceptable to US health corporations take-overs. There are other hospital closure plans still going on, as well as the threat to Liverpool Women’s Hospital.

The ICB conducted an “engagement” with the public about the future of Liverpool Women’s Hospital. It was not well publicised but did include four in-person meetings for which they asked people to register. In all four meetings, their proposals were roundly rejected, but the attendance was small, very little effort was put into getting real engagement. We will write more about this in another post. None of the meetings were at a time suitable for working mothers to attend.

What you can do to help

Help with the campaign distribute leaflets and help getting the petition signed.

Raise it with your trade union, or other organisation

Tell your MP and councillor Liverpool Women’s Hospital must stay at Crown Street as a full women’s service run by experts in women’s health, in maternity and related services. Tell your MP that hospitals must cooperate not compete or merge.

Tell them that the winter crisis is unacceptable. Tell them that problems including finance, staffing, buildings and equipment must be sorted and the drain into private companies must stop.

Above all talk to people about this issue

SLWH – NHS A3 1

Letter to your MP re 2024 closure threat to Liverpool Women’s Hospital

You choose what you write to your MP; this has been drawn up to cover many of the points people ask about. MPs can be contacted by email and by post.

We have a long and short version of a letter to the MPs here.

The short version is

Your address

 ( find your MP @They work for you)

Dear

I am writing to you as my MP. I  support keeping Liverpool Women’s Hospital at Crown Street. Please intervene to keep Liverpool Women’s Hospital fully functioning on Crown Street. I don’t care how much Spire wants the site.

As an MP, you will know about the many reports on the problems in Maternity nationally and the issues with women’s health in these years of austerity. You know about the increased risk babies face at birth in areas of poverty like Liverpool. Surely you do not support cuts to Maternity services?

The hospital needs much better funding, and all hospitals should work together cooperatively. We have a national Maternity crisis. Closing Crown Street will make things worse for all our mothers, daughters, sisters, friends, lovers, and babies.

The NHS faces an appalling winter crisis in winter 24-25. Make sure the NHS is funded and equipped to save lives, not cost lives.

Hospitals should be organised as Nye Bevan intended, a cheaper more effective system than any the Thatcherites designed.

I oppose racism. In the year we have seen the worst race riots this century, closing Liverpool Women’s Hospital at Crown Street is a slap in the face for all anti-racists. That hospital is seen as a safe space. It was built not so long ago as part of the reparations for the racism of the past.

 I would like an appointment to discuss this with you.

Yours

This is the more detailed version.

 Your address

 ( find your MP @They work for you)

“Dear ……

I am writing to tell you, as my MP, just how worried I and many others, are about the situation in the NHS in Cheshire and Merseyside. We ask that you intervene.

Lord Darzi said, “The British people rely on it ( the NHS) for the moments of greatest joy – when a new life comes into being and those of deepest sorrow.”

The current plans and lack of plans for operating with this lack of resources in Cheshire and Merseyside will damage the moments of joy and increase those of deepest sorrow.

I draw your attention to the threat to Liverpool Women’s Hospital.

I have followed the meetings of the ICB and of Liverpool Women’s Hospital. The financial situation for both organisations is unacceptable. It is wrong that the place where so many babies are born is so short of the money required to operate day to day.

The start of the process of closing Liverpool Women’s hospital, from the meeting on October 9th, is very worrying and cannot be isolated from the general crisis in the NHS. Please consider the following points

  1. Liverpool Women’s Hospital is valued by the women of Liverpool and the public, with seventy-five thousand people signing the petition to save Liverpool Women’s Hospital. There have been three big rallies on this topic. The closure of this hospital will further damage the health of women and babies in Liverpool and the wider area. It is a regional maternal medicine centre. It is a tertiary referral centre for gynaecology, performing approximately 10,000 procedures per year. Liverpool Women’s Hospital is seen by the women of Liverpool and beyond as a safe place in an era of growing  violence against women and in the context of declining health amongst women, as the parliamentary report showed
  2.  The CQC describes Liverpool Women’s Hospital as safe. Despite several recent visits, the CQC did not raise any of the issues raised by the ICB report of 9 October. Other issues related to staffing and safety in maternity were raised, but this is one of the safer maternity units in the country.
  3. The document presented to the ICB on October 9th technically started the pre-consultation engagement about moving Liverpool Women’s Hospital services from Crown Street. Yet it gives no explanation of where our babies will be born, where gynaecology or all the other services will move to, or the indication of capital to provide alternative premises. There is no risk assessment or impact assessment.
  4. Nationally and locally, the experience of women giving birth has deteriorated and this has done much damage. There is a maternity crisis in the UK following years of underfunding, understaffing and the disastrous outcomes of the 2012 Health and Care Act, as described in the Darzi report. It is widely anticipated that another heart-breaking report on Maternity services from Donna Ockendon will be published next month, this time about Nottingham. No one working in or around Maternity can deny the existence of this crisis. In this situation, women are angry. The CQC’s September 2024 report  on the maternity service nationally said https://www.cqc.org.uk/press-release/action-needed-now-prevent-harm-maternity-services-becoming-normalised
  5. The staffing system at Liverpool Women’s Hospital and other NHS maternity services rests on Birthrate Plus, which urgently needs review. We need better services for the babies, the mothers and the staff. Mothers and babies need more attention, and only increased staff can deliver this.
  6. Liverpool Women’s Hospital has serious financial problems,  with a deficit of 19%  recently reported. The Maternity tariff on which much of their income rests is inadequate, nationally and locally. This tariff level is a core driver of the national Maternity crisis. Liverpool Women’s Hospital is currently fully staffed with midwives, at least according to Birthrate Plus, thanks to the recruitment of newly qualified staff. As with the national service, the loss of older staff who left in disgust at the safety of the whole Maternity service leaves intense pressure on these new midwives.
  7. The health of Liverpool’s babies must have priority, especially as childhood health in Liverpool, already damaged by poverty and pollution, is not mentioned.
  8. Liverpool Women’s Hospital is based in Crown Street Liverpool 8. It was built as part of Project Rosemary, a gesture of reparation for the terrible racism that the area has suffered. To remove the hospital in the same year as the worst race riots in Liverpool since Charles Wooton was killed is truly a slap in the face for all anti-racists.
  9. Liverpool Women’s Hospital is  one mile from Liverpool Royal Hospital; it is not “isolated.” Other branches of Liverpool Universities Hospital Foundation Trust are much further away from each other, and patients move between these buildings. The 2012 and related legislation introduced the business model, making each hospital a competing entity with other hospitals. This must change. Hospitals must work cooperatively.
  10. One risk mentioned in the ICB document is that deteriorating women cannot be managed at Liverpool Women’s Hospital, yet the trust board has reported major improvements in this. No hospital can guarantee never having to move a patient to another hospital. About 10,000 such moves happen annually in the NHS. At present there is not a critical care unit (CCU) available at LWH. There is a high dependency unit (HDU) at Crown Street and staff working on the gynaecology HDU have undertaken training for critical care.
  11. Another risk mentioned in the document is that other hospitals in Liverpool do not have staff to deal with pregnancy or other gynaecological conditions. This must be addressed, but not by closing Liverpool Women’s Hospital.
  12.  Another risk mentioned is that services might be moved out of Liverpool if certain specifications are not met. But this report does not say where Liverpool’s babies will be born. Will that, too, be sent out of Liverpool?
  13.  Risk 4 discusses recruitment and retention difficulties. Midwives at LWH face no recruitment problems. The problems with other specialities are national, not local.
  14. In the weirdest contradiction, Risk 5 says, “Women receiving care from hospital services, their families and the staff delivering care may be more at risk of psychological harm due to the current configuration of services.” Closing Liverpool Women’s Hospital will definitely risk psychological harm, as the place we see as safe is taken from us against huge popular opposition.
  15.  The engagement events are inadequate. Only two of these events are not in working hours, none are in North Liverpool or locally in central Liverpool. It requires time and some computer skills to register for them.

I also have serious concerns about the  NHS winter crisis 2023-24, which the ICB has been clear will not be better than last year. The ICB is underfunded ( but spends too much on financial consultants and contracts, driven to do so by NHSE.) It is also under pressure to get the Liverpool Specialist Hospitals, Liverpool Heart and Chest, Liverpool Walton Centre and Clatterbridge Cancer Centre firmly into the cash-strapped ICB control. Liverpool Women’s Hospital is also partially funded through the specialist hospitals programme and is affected by this move from national to local funding.

I recall the announcement nine years ago that one Liverpool Hospital must close, and then it was announced that Liverpool Women’s Hospital was the one they had chosen. The chaos over Liverpool Royal New build and PFI, plus the pandemic, gave some breathing space, but the coming of the ICB and NHSE’s determination to reduce the number of hospitals in Liverpool have brought this back to the table.

 I would like to discuss this with you personally.

 For all our mothers, daughters, sisters, friends, lovers and babies, Save Liverpool Women’s Hospital

 Yours

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.

Keep spreading the word

Speak out for the NHS. The NHS matters in this election and after it.

Don’t leave it to the politicians.

The NHS came from the people and the people must organise to get it back!

Restore and Repair the NHS.

 Cheshire and Merseyside NHS campaigners are taking a campaign van around the area to remind people of the need to Restore and Repair the NHS.Politicians should heed the needs of the people before the needs of the banks

This article gives information gives more information than the leaflet we are giving out

We say to any government, you must repair the damage of the last two decades, and rebuild the service after years of cuts. The capacity of the NHS to provide adequate timely treatment was cut as the population aged. But it made big money for the very rich. We want the NHS back for the people, not for profit.

Join our campaigns until the politicians restore and repair the NHS.

The Royal College of Nurses has declared a national emergency in the NHS.

Doctors are warning of large numbers of avoidable deaths from NHS shortages.

Doctors say the pressure on the NHS is unsustainable.

The NHS is very important in this election and the next government must restore and repair the NHS.

Please join the campaign to Restore the NHS.

Our health, our life span and our very lives depend on the NHS and on public health services

Life expectancy in Cheshire and Merseyside is lower than the national average for men and women. Access to health care is crucial in this. Will you willingly give up years of your life, and the lives of those dear to you, to fund privatisation and poor healthcare?

The NHS is underfunded. Our local Integrated Care Board said in May 2024 that “provider financial plans exceed the level of funding available” Providers are hospitals. The hospitals have huge waiting lists and dreadful A&E waiting times. They need the money. Maternity desperately needs funding.

The damage to the NHS has been deliberate. Privatisation, underfunding, deskilling staff, closure of hospitals and beds, organisational “reforms” using expensive financial consultants, PFI, and poor building maintenance; it all adds up to Government policy and it has been lethal.

 Privatisation involves public money being paid to private companies to provide a service and allows the private company to make a profit and to deny care to some patients. That profit is money that could go to the public service. They are not more competent nor more efficient. £10 million pounds a week goes to private profit according to We Own It. The ICS structure is based around “commissioning services” pushing ever more of the NHS budget into  the private sector.

The NHS is headed by a banker, not a doctor, and a banker with a history. The NHS has been deliberately underfunded.

We say, go back to the full NHS model!

Mend the NHS in its many services –

Maternity

Fund and staff maternity services to equal the best in Europe. We need more midwives. Can we say that again? We need more midwives. Did they hear that? Say it again WE NEED MORE MIDWIVES. There have been so many reports on the state of maternity services, we need action now. Women and their families are angry about what’s happening in maternity.

Children’s Health

The health of our children is worsening. Ensure every child has timely access to full healthcare, at birth, in the community, at the GP surgery, at Accident and Emergency, and in planned care in the hospital. Bring back health visitors.

GPs

The GP service must be restored and be staffed by qualified doctors. The government must allow spending on doctors as well as ancillary services. A good GP puts years on your life. GP services have been cut with overall funding cuts of 20% per patient per year since 2016.

Mental Health Care

Mental health services must be renationalised and brought back into the NHS and staff trained and paid to NHS standards. The damage is disgusting.

Dental Health Services

Everyone has (or did have) teeth. Our dental health services must be made available to everyone. The damage is immense. Change the contracts to ensure this. Bring back NHS dentistry.

Hearing Services

Audiology must be brought back in-house to make sure everyone has access and no one has to pay privatised prices. Hearing aids are free on the NHS if you insist on using the NHS. These hearing aids are just as good as the ones  for which people pay hundreds

 Ophthalmology

Eye health services must be brought back into the NHS to ensure quality of service, and access for all and to prevent unnecessary treatments that make profit. When so much of the service is farmed out to for-profit companies  and the NHS just does the most complex the whole training system fails

A&E

Accident and Emergency Services. Waiting for hours in A&E is an awful experience as is being treated in a corridor. According to new estimates, long waits in A&E departments may have caused around 30,000 ‘excess deaths’ last year. The stress on staff is also unbearable. We say No more winter crisis. Employ the staff, provide the buildings, and open more hospital beds.

Healthcare for all, free at the point of need. End the policy of charging for some services, reduce prescription costs, and stop discrimination against migrants, who pay twice for the NHS and are charged at 150% of costs yet pay all the same taxes as everyone else.

Our data

The NHS as a national service for over 75 years is gold dust as far as big data companies, health insurance companies and the US health corporations are concerned, the information about our health care, our symptoms and treatment must return to being confidential. Palantir has been given a huge sum of money to manage our data. Kick out the big US data firms and the other private firms who are getting rich off of our data.

Staffing

All vacancies in the NHS must be funded and recruitment processes must be positive and wide-reaching, including winning back many nurses and midwives who have left. Say no to two-year trained staff, no to the use of Physician Associates except in situations where they are in real-time supervision. Workforce planning must be based on training and employing more qualified doctors and nurses to meet the needs of the people. Student debt in medical nursing midwifery and allied professions must be abolished, and bursaries re-introduced so ordinary people can afford to train.

Pay the NHS and social care staff well. This will help keep staff and reduce their stress.

 Social care

Social care covers services to the frail elderly and to disabled people people of all ages both at home and in care homes. Councils are starved of funds and stupidly went along with the policy of privatising their own care homes. Now care homes are privately run,  by for-profit companies and do not provide a universal service but a service where and when they can make big profits. Most are privately owned by big companies and hedge funds. This is more public money going to shareholders. Neither are care services free at the point of need but charge large fees to users who do not qualify for NHS funding or Local Authority funding.  Children’s social care is in a shockingly bad state and adult social care needs radical reform. If you are interested in this area see the End Social Care Disgrace campaign

The private sector. This is no solution to the healthcare crisis. They don’t have the full range of treatments or facilities and are dependent on the NHS for backup. Most doctors who work in the private sector also work in the NHS. The NHS has103,277 general and acute beds  while the private sector has about 11000

We all need healthcare. The need for the NHS is crystal clear. All the parties say sweet words about protecting the NHS, but we have to hold them to these promises. (bar one- Reform wants to bring in an Insurance/market-based system)

The NHS is the most cost-effective structure and the most equitable system for healthcare.

Give the NHS an immediate boost to its funding.

Renationalise the NHS. Make it once again a national service. Stop privatisation.

A healthy population is obviously more effective than one with millions of people waiting for treatment. Millions of people denied treatment or kept waiting for years is morally unacceptable and bad economics.

Run the NHS for healthcare, not for profit. Sack the privatisers!

Make our health care a national service again.

Healthcare free at the point of need for every human, as it was in 1947.

While this campaign would be pleased to see the government that has done such lethal damage to our people’s healthcare kicked out on their ear, neither main party has committed in its manifesto enough money to tackle the dreadful state of the NHS.

The incoming government must fund the NHS to prevent the next still worse winter crisis. It must address the issues around maternity, GPs, dentists and NHS pay, or the people will be very angry, just as the current government is blamed. It took many years to win the NHS and might take years to win it back but the campaign will go on if you give it your support

The campaign to restore and repair the NHS must go on !

Liverpool Women’s Hospital. Great work and great problems.
This banner in Liverpool Life museum is from one of the campaign groups for women’s health in the early twentieth century

Women and babies in Liverpool are entitled to the highest standard of healthcare. Our grandparents and great grandparents fought to found the NHS and left us this as their legacy. The NHS was a national service providing excellent healthcare, publicly provided and government funded. The new NHS did magnificent work for infant and maternal mortality.

In the last twenty years though, there have been years of cuts and privatisation in healthcare and years of poverty and subsequent ill health in Liverpool. A report to Liverpool city council this year said that, without change, “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.”

It is time to demand better.

Campaigning for the whole NHS

We are campaigning to Save Liverpool Women’s Hospital and to restore and repair the NHS. We want to see improved funding and staffing and to see the whole NHS move back to its original model of a national public service, publicly provided, providing universal comprehensive and timely care for everyone free at the point of need and funded by Government. If you have not yet signed our petition please do so.

Healthcare staff have worked way beyond what should have been needed to keep some good services going. Every day people are grateful for their work, their kindness and humour but sheer human effort cannot compensate for inadequate funding and too few staff.

Liverpool Women’s Hospital provides some excellent services but it has some serious difficulties too.

The Liverpool Women’s Hospital board meeting on 9/05/2024 reported some excellent staff work, including improved methods of helping premature and very premature babies survive and thrive. It also reported the success of moving early pregnancy loss to its own area, a development much valued by the mothers involved. Previous meetings have seen patients reporting their experiences too. In April there was a very positive report from a patient about her experience of the care she received from the Rainbow Clinic as a previously bereaved mum. We have also seen excellent presentations about the pioneering work on endometriosis and menopause at different meetings. The Hospital website says Every day on average, 24 babies are born in Liverpool Women’s Maternity Unit and another three babies are born prematurely and cared for in our Neonatal Unit.  Most of Liverpool’s babies are born at Liverpool Women’s Hospital and sick and tiny babies are cared for in the beautiful new NICU ( Neo Natal Intensive Care Unit)

Entrance to the NICU

The Liverpool Women’s Hospital is undertaking a major anti-racism drive to improve outcomes for patients and staff. We very much welcome this initiative. It is essential to save lives.

The core problem for Liverpool Women’s Hospital is under funding. This underfunding stems from the national underfunding of maternity as well as the general under funding of the NHS. This longterm underfunding has meant years of cuts. The NHS organisational changes from 2012 to create Trusts and Foundation Trusts also wasted many resources that should have gone to patient care.

Liverpool Women’s Hospital also has a long waiting list for cancer patients and waiting lists for gynaecology appointments. Some more staff have been appointed and hopefully the list will be dramatically reduced.These waits cost lives and health. The Chief executive reported that

“NHS England’s tiering process for cancer performance is designed to provide accountability and additional central support for trusts that are most at risk of missing national cancer targets. Trusts are categorised into tiers based on their performance, with Tier 1 being the most challenged and requiring the most support. Trusts may move between tiers based on their performance improvements or deteriorations.
In a letter received on 26 April 2024 from NHS England, it was confirmed that following a review of cancer performance, and in agreement with the regional team, the Trust will be in Tier 1 for Cancer from the week commencing 29 April 2024. The move to Tier 1 will involve regular meetings to discuss delivery progress and any required support from the relevant parts of NHS England.

Last year the hospital had a poor Care Quality Commission report for maternity and it has taken work to improve on this.New management is in place and they have plans to ensure that improvements are happening.

Our babies, our mothers, deserve much more.Every mother every baby treated at Liverpool women’s deserves the very best. Poverty from low wages, low benefits and poor housing is costing lives, and causing long term ill health. Inadequate health services are part of this.The Care Quality Commision report last year showed how much harm has been done by this underfunding and under staffing. The management must also be responsible for some of the damage mentioned in the Care Quality Commission reports.

The funding issues at Liverpool Women’s means that to meet the current level of service it needs twenty five percent more funding. Money is spent very carefully but for basic safety to be met, that extra spending is essential. At present the required money is being spent and temporary support funding has been made available, by the ICB or national NHS. However this situation puts the hospital into whats called Level 3 of the National Oversight Framework which could bring in management decisions not based on the needs of staff and patients, as the government clamps down on public spending.

Many studies show that money spent on good healthcare repays for itself many times over. At birth this is especially so as bth injuries can last a lifetime.

Neither merging the hospital nor dispersing its services will change that fundamental financial situation. Only an improvement of maternity funding will make a real difference.

Screen shot from page 52 of the LWH Board meeting 9 05 24

The underfunding of maternity leads to staff overwork and reduced services. Government safety figures for staffing are met but we say these safety figures are inadequate. The Government funding does not provide sufficient staff to deliver the kind of service patients and staff require. yet money is squandered on private companies and financial consultants.

There are national problems with maternity services described in many prestigious reports, as well as the Ockendon and Kirkup reports. No report has yet managed to shift the Government’s policies. We believe we need a huge campaign to win back the NHS.

A large part of Liverpool Women’s Hospital Maternity spend is on the maternity Incentive scheme, a government owned insurance system, run on a business model. Liverpool Women’s Hospital meets all the requirements of this scheme and so gets a refund from hospitals that do not meet all the safety requirements. This is an unbelievable situation..

Payouts from the fund are higher than the funding for maternity.If maternity were well funded fewer babies would be damaged and have to claim through the courts from this insurance fund.

In this crazy situation the hospital is still expected to make cuts (CIPs).

Our demonstration last October.

We have written before about how planned Cheshire and Merseyside ICB funding will not repair the situation patients experienced last winter. This poor experience was seen in many aspects, including A and E, care in corridors, access to GPs, access to NHS dentistry, and inadequate mental health provision. It will be worse next winter.

It was no surprise to hear there will be no new Hospital built in the next decade, nor does Liverpool Women’s require a new building. we believe that the new building idea was floated to make the idea of merging Liverpool Women’s Hospital into the big acute hospital more palatable. The existing building is less than thirty years old.However the drive to make fundamental changes remains, with merger or dispersal being the most likely recommendations. WE want to keep a distinct women’s hospital.

In the April Board meeting of Liverpool Women’s Hospital it was reported that work is in progress for major changes.

“the Women’s Hospital Services in Liverpool Programme. As part of the roadmap, the initial phase of the programme had been outlined, with an emphasis on the importance of openness, transparency, and continuous engagement with the public.
The development of a clinical case for change was scheduled for the spring and summer of 2024, with publication expected later in the same year. Feedback from this engagement phase, gathered during the winter of 2024/25, would then inform the approach to designing future services, with further development of potential options anticipated to commence in early 2025.” So the threats to Liverpool Women’s Hospital are still very real.

A meeting has been held with other Liverpool hospitals about the future for Liverpool Women’s Hospital and women’s health in the other hospitals in Liverpool.We have not yet been able to see which issues the other hospitals raised. Public consultation is promised this year.

No hospital can exist in a vacuum. Every hospital should be working in a mutually supportive system. The NHS was founded to be a national service, not a collection of competing hospitals. System working was damaged by the 2012 Act and the drive to privatisation. Cooperation and system working is required for the future of the other specialist hospitals in Liverpool, like the Heart and Chest and the Walton Centre.

Our campaign to Save Liverpool Women’s Hospital and to restore and repair the NHS has huge public support and is growing steadily.

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

The Future of Liverpool Women’s Hospital, Spring 2024

Save Liverpool Women’s Hospital.

The future of Liverpool Women’s Hospital has been under threat for nine years now. The petition which is at the heart of the Save Liverpool Women’s Hospital Campaign says “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.

In the Liverpool Women’s Hospital Board papers 11.04. 2024, it was announced that “An indicative programme plan had been developed and this reflected the unlikelihood that a new hospital building, co-located with an adult acute site, would be built within a five-to-ten-year timescale.

( In plain English this means they will not get a new Hospital)

 And that

 “… discussions were held on alternative solutions for citywide women’s healthcare.

Our opponents promised the public that a new smaller hospital on the Royal site would improve services. We always said that such a plan was magical thinking and that even if they got the money for a new building the existing problems would still be there. We said moving the Liverpool Women’s Hospital from the Crown Street site would be bad for women and babies.

Now we are in the horrible position that the bribe of a new hospital has evaporated but the core financial and organisational problems remain. We well remember the Panorama programme many years ago when it was announced that they wanted to close one hospital in Liverpool, and that clearly was Liverpool Women’s Hospital.

There are serious problems for Liverpool Women’s Hospital not to do with the Hospital site.

The Board of Liverpool Women’s Hospital has made it clear that safe services require extra funding. We demand that this money be provided.

Liverpool Women’s Hospital has a grave shortage of funds for crucial services. The fault for this lies with the last four governments but especially the current government who are very much aware of the damage they are doing to maternity care. There have been numerous high-profile reports on this, not least of these reports, being the work of Donna Ockendon. Donna Ockendon is now working on another maternity report, this time from Nottingham.

There are five reasons this national problem impacts on Liverpool Women’s Hospital

  1. Healthcare in the UK is badly funded and badly organised, wasting money and resources on privatisation.
  2. Eighty per cent of Liverpool Women’s Hospital’s budget comes through maternity funding, mainly the Maternity Tariff. The maternity tariff nationally is inadequate. No other hospital relies quite as much on maternity funding as the Liverpool Women’s Hospital does.
  3. The costs of the Clinical Negligence Scheme weigh particularly hard on this, the largest maternity hospital. The Government scandalously spends more on compensation than it does for the whole maternity service.
  4. The hospital is a Foundation Trust, which is an expensive management model for a small hospital.
  5. The model of healthcare from this, and some earlier governments, saw hospitals as competing businesses rather than a cooperating system. A small hospital could not thrive in such a scenario. This model is changing but the new ICB model also poses serious problems. We call for a return to the original Bevan model of the NHS, where a fully funded national, publicly owned and delivered health system based on cooperation not competition, sees ongoing improvement in maternity services.

Liverpool Women’s Hospital lacks crucial services because of these funding issues.

Our petition, now with more than 40,000 signatures online and more than 20,000 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.”

Our campaign wants to improve the whole maternity journey for women and babies, every aspect of it, safety, respect and celebration of birth. We campaign for maternity everywhere in the UK. It is not possible to solve the fundamental problems of Liverpool Women’s Hospital without solving national funding and staffing issues but we can stop projects that make things worse. There are many and detailed reports about how the experience of maternity has worsened in recent years.

Our campaign wants midwives, nurses, obstetricians, CSWs and other staff to feel safe, and respected at work, free from undue stress, with access to ongoing education and training and with the opportunity to eat well, go to the toilet and have proper breaks at work, both day and night.

Our campaign wants to see maternity well-funded and protected from privatisation and protected from trendy, untried innovations.

We want those running maternity services to remember that as medics they have a duty of candour, to tell the truth about funding and staffing issues.

Since 2010 there has been damage done to all maternity and women’s health services nationally, and Liverpool Women’s Hospital has not escaped that damage. Underfunding, understaffing, and lack of key equipment and services have all had an effect.

We campaign for the whole of the NHS, not just maternity

Why do we want a women’s hospital?

We want excellent healthcare for women and babies. Our babies, our mothers, deserve the best. It is that simple.

However, that is not what this and previous governments have provided. We want to keep the focus on the needs of women and their babies. The scale and depth of the maternity scandals in other big multi-site, multi-specialism hospitals is a testament to how important this is. There have been many prestigious reports published about how bad the damage has been to Maternity and to women’s health. One in seven maternity units have closed during the period of cuts and this wave of closures has not stopped.

Cuts in NHS funding are part of the Austerity project. Austerity cuts have hit women and children and the working class very badly whilst the rich get ever richer. In this situation, we must protect what we have and not let it go. Maternity in England has suffered grievously under austerity. Maternal deaths are the highest in 20 years.

Ockendon’s reports have painted a grim picture of the failings of the system. Our campaign has fought hard for national as well as local funding and held two conferences on this matter. None of these hospitals involved in the big maternity scandals were standalone  Women’s Hospitals like Liverpool Women’s Hospital and their failings were not blamed on being a standalone Women’s Hospital. Yet the standalone character of Liverpool Women’s Hospital was what all the case for change was based on.

When Donna Ockendon did her first report on the Shrewsbury baby deaths it was revealed that many hospitals providing maternity care did not even have a member of their board charged with Maternity care, so board papers could go with nary a mention of maternity. Bad Care Quality reports were not given due consideration by the Shrewsbury board.

  • “The Trust board did not have oversight or a full understanding of issues and concerns within the maternity service, resulting in neither strategic direction and effective change, nor the development of accountable implementation plans.“

Most of Liverpool’s babies are delivered at Liverpool Women’s Hospital. The hospital delivers roughly 8,000 births per year. The Hospital also provides maternity care from a wider region for complex pregnancies and very premature or very sick newborn babies. It is a Maternal Medicine Centre, one of three within the Northwest Maternal Medicine Network. The Hospital also provides Gynaecological treatments,  Fertility services, Genetics services, Cancer care and termination of pregnancy, when that requires surgical intervention. The hospital also has a reputation as being a safe and caring place for women (though that has faltered a little in recent years). For all these reasons,  Liverpool Women’s Hospital is considered to be especially important by the people of Liverpool and beyond, but not considered so important by the Government or NHS England. For the last nine years, the future of Liverpool Women’s Hospital has been under ongoing threat.

We ask the people of Liverpool to continue to support our campaign for a fully funded, fully staffed, fully equipped hospital on the Liverpool Women’s Hospital Crown Street Site and for a fully funded, fully staffed, publicly owned and delivered national health service.

We can do it!
Thanks to Anjali027 for this picture.

Campaigning works. The campaign to Save Liverpool Women’s Hospital has marked International Women’s Day for eight years now. We have fought hard to save the hospital in a time of great damage to the NHS and damage to the maternity services nationally.

Donna Ockendon with just one of her damning reports on maternity care.

These damages have been described in prestigious reports yet still the government closes its ears. The hospital has been damaged by cuts, poor staffing, and bad policy decisions, but the hospital is still there, still under threat, still underfunded and understaffed, but still there. Campaigning works. We have miles to go before we have the hospital we need but at least what we have has not (yet) been taken away

Grief in Gaza

On this International Women’s Day, our hearts break and our voices are raised for the plight of pregnant women and their babies in Gaza, giving birth now without any medical attention being available as every hospital is destroyed. Food and water are in very short supply. This damage to mothers and babies is sickening. We share the feeling of dread as the horrid Israeli threat of an attack at the start of the holy month of Ramadan approaches. We demand a ceasefire and a just peace where the children of Palestine and Israel can grow up in peace justice and harmony.

Retired midwife Rebecca speaking in Liverpool about the plight of women giving birth in Gaza

Our thoughts go to the women of Ukraine, and those from Ukraine now living in this city. Our thoughts to the women of Yemen, Sudan, and Haiti all caught in the maelstrom of crises and war. We send solidarity to the women of Russia organizing against the odds for peace, and to all the women of the peace movement across the world

We celebrate the victory of women in France who now see the right to abortion written into the constitution.

We send greetings to all the US women who are fighting a terrible reaction in politics generally, but especially in their rights to control their fertility. This is in a country that does not provide decent maternity leave, and with ten times the maternal death rate of Australia, Austria, Israel, Japan, and Spain. Eighty-four percent of reviewed maternal deaths were described as preventable.

We send greetings to the women of the Kurdish community here in Liverpool and to the Kurds fighting for respect and peace in their homelands.

Picture from the camp in Cox’s Bazaar in Bangladesh

Our hearts go out to the women and girls of the Rohingya community, driven from their homeland and living now in a million-strong refugee camp in Bangladesh.

We live in a time of genocide and war. We look to the generations of women who have worked for peace, including those from Greenham Common

Liverpool, once the second city of the British “Empire”( and all the racism that involved), and because of the trade links, is home to a black community dating back hundreds of years and one of the oldest Chinese communities outside of China.

From a mural outisde Liverpool Women’s Hospital entrance.

Sadly though we now mourn two black women who have died at Liverpool Women’s Hospital from complications in pregnancy or birth. In their honour, we rejoin our efforts to campaign for better safer maternity services, better staffing ratios, and well-paid staff with more time to think and plan, with more support top-down, to tackle blame culture & reduce tensions. This must be accompanied by more investment in staff. Managed decline has led to half the staff with double the workload. Paperwork is now all online so more admin and less time with patient contact. The culture needs to change. This will take a lot of work as there is still also a massive issue with hierarchy and bullying. More investment, and more support, will ultimately improve the work environment which will subsequently give women better experiences as tensions lessen.

Liverpool Women’s Hospital has a history of anti-racism but that, like many other great provisions, can be severely damaged by austerity cuts. This tradition of anti racism needs to be enthusiastically revived but overworked burnt out staff are hardly in a good position for this. A good indicator of a safe environment for Black and Ethnic Minority patients is ethnic minority staff reporting that they do not experience racism and discrimination. Sadly, a report to the board described the opposite. However, in a recent webinar about migrant women giving birth, Liverpool was highly praised for the support midwives gave to one of the speakers. The specialist teams supporting vulnerable women do great work.

Image from MBBRACE

We join with others in demanding action to make it safer for all mothers to give birth and demand action to reduce the particular risk to Black Asian and poor women of all races. In the UK, the rates of baby death and stillbirth among Black and Asian mothers are double those for white women. We have written about the higher number of deaths among black babies.

In one of these maternal deaths, investigators from the national body the Maternity and Newborn Safety Investigations (MSNI) were called in after the woman died. They reported that “The investigation into her death found hospital staff had not taken some observations because the patient was “being difficult”,( our emphasis) according to comments in her medical notes. “…ethnicity and health inequalities impacted on the care provided to the patient, suggesting that an unconscious cultural bias delayed the timing of diagnosis and response to her clinical deterioration”. “This was evident in discussions with staff involved in the direct care of the patient“.

“She was being difficult”. These words have sparked fear and anger in many women. This sister would have been in a strange environment, far from home, with people speaking a language she did not speak. She would have been full of hormones from her miscarriage. She had had babies before and would have known what she was feeling was not right. And she was ill and in pain. Because she was being “difficult” she was not monitored as she should have been and this cost her the chance of life. Now two babies are motherless and a family bereft.

The wider impact of this death.

In the aftermath of this death, and the publicity it gained, Melissa Sigodo (@melissasigodo), a Zimbabwean and British community reporter from the Daily Mirror, held a Twitter (X)Space meeting with 90 mainly black women, from across the country, discussing the case. The experiences of these women were heartbreaking. This case had reawakened their fears.

There is no room for racism in maternity care.  

The safety of women giving birth is the responsibility of the service, not the individual. Every woman matters. Liverpool Women’s has had a good reputation for anti-racism. This reputation must be regained. Most midwives, health care assistants, and obstetricians would agree. Developing a safe place for every woman to be treated and to work takes time and effort. We echo the words and determination of the suffragettes, in saying “There must be deeds, not words” on this matter.

The hospital is changing its systems to support patients who are rapidly deteriorating and we welcome this.

Liverpool Women’s Hospital was built on Crown Street site as part of Project Rosemary, to help heal the injustices which had led to the uprising in Toxteth in 1981. Black building workers were employed in the construction of the hospital. The hospital now serves a great ethnic mix of people, for example in Princes Park Ward non-White English/ British resident population range is 59%, and in nearby Picton is 52%. Racism at this Hospital would be particularly offensive.

Mary Seacole Pioneering nurse and heroine of British soldiers inthe Crimean war

We can do it!

Let us remember the work of the great nurse Mary Seacole and all the women of the Windrush generation who so wonderfully staffed the early NHS. Liverpool Women’s Hospital must be a pioneer in antiracist women’s healthcare so no black woman fears using the service nor working in this or any other hospital.

We need to campaign – and the history of International Women’s Day reminds us that campaigns can win. 

On March the 8th and the few weeks that follow it we celebrate International Women’s Day. Women’s lives have been improved and much has been achieved since the founding of International Working Women’s Day. The gains made for women over the last 150 years are significant. The Fawcett Society published a list of these gains a few years ago. The women who won these gains did so despite the difficulties they faced.

Women today are potentially much more powerful than previous generations. We too can organize to improve our lives. So many of us are in employment that we have real power there, that could be organized much more effectively through trade unions. We can more easily campaign across the world. Remember the Women’s Strike in Iceland.

Fans supporting food banks provides practical help and campaigns against food poverty

Today we face real problems and worsening conditions so there is a greater need than ever for women to organise. We can take courage from the past for the very serious obstacles women face today. Those obstacles are serious and becoming ever more so.

Clinical support workers at Arrowe Park Hospital ion strike in the snow.

We salute all the NHS staff who have taken industrial action. We salute them also for working on in the terrible conditions imposed by this government. This shows the strength we have. War, austerity, climate, and economic crises make this era extremely dangerous but never have women been more equipped to demand and force change for the better.

“Whether they are older women suffering loneliness and isolation, single parents with additional caring responsibilities, or simply working mums trying to stretch household budgets to feed their families, the survey shows that women are significantly more likely to need food support from charities and community groups.”

There is much to do to improve women’s lives and many of the gains made are being eroded. The Cost-of-Living crisis hits women hardest. 75% of people accessing food support from Fare Shares a food charity are women.

https://www.stylist.co.uk/money/the-motherhood-penalty/502277

It is great that women are in work but not good that male and female pay is far from equal. It’s great that sex discrimination is illegal but it still happens, less openly perhaps. It’s great that equal pay law exists but women still earn less than men and the gap widens over a working life.

The motherhood penalty kicks in.  Forty-four percent of women are earning less now than they were before they had children. The employment rate was higher for mothers than either women or men without dependent children and has been since 2017.

Women are described as “the shock absorbers of poverty”, managing family bills and compensating for the government’s neglect and austerity policies.

Image credit to CADTM

What is happening in the UK is mirrored in other countries. Oxfam International’s report shows that while the richest 1 percent captured 54 percent of new global wealth over the past decade, this has accelerated to 63 percent in the past two years. $42 trillion of new wealth was created between December 2019 and December 2021.

“While ordinary people are making daily sacrifices on essentials like food, the super-rich have outdone even their wildest dreams. Just two years in, this decade is shaping up to be the best yet for billionaires —a roaring ‘20s boom for the world’s richest,” said Gabriela Bucher, Executive Director of Oxfam International 2021”

Not one thing that women have gained has been won without organisation, agitation, campaigning and struggle. So, it is today. Let our inspiration be in how women  have  struggled for a better life in the past and  in the great campaigns today.

“Inspire Inclusion” is 2024s International women’s Day slogan. We want to inspire women’s inclusion in the drive to improve the lives of working-class women and children.

It wasn’t wealthy women who led the earlier struggles of the women working in mills, tobacco factories, or  as domestic servants. Our inspiration is with the women who fought for all women,  and founded International Women’s Day

Bread
and Roses

In the words  the women’s anthem  Bread and Roses ( credit to Unison) we say

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

In the tradition of the suffragettes,Let’s Inspire or incite women to rebellion, or even incite women to organise for a better life for locally nationally and internationally.

What Is Happening in Health Care in Cheshire and Merseyside in January 2024?

Save Liverpool Women’s Hospital is part of a coalition of campaigns fighting to Restore and Repair the NHS, and to win full staffing (with good pay, conditions, and qualifications) to improve the health of our largely working-class communities in Cheshire and Merseyside. One of the tasks we do together is to monitor the activities of the ICB, the so-called Integrated Care Board which replaced the NHS in the 2022 Health and Care Act. We have to resist the vicious cuts being made and challenge the damage being done.

Arrowe Park Hospital Clinical Support Workers on strike for fair pay and equality with other hospitals

The Cheshire and Merseyside ICS  is meeting in New Brighton on 25th January, from 9.00am to midday. People can ask questions from 9 until 9.30

Location: Tower Room, Floral Pavilion Theatre & Conference Centre, Marine Promenade, New Brighton, Wallasey CH45 2JS.Free parking opposite the Fort Perch car park.

https://www.cheshireandmerseyside.nhs.uk/get-involved/upcoming-meetings-and-events/nhs-cheshire-and-merseyside-integrated-care-board-january-2024/

Even before we read the paperwork for the ICB meeting, ( It should be published this week) we know patients and staff face serious issues and we will not sit back and let our services be reorganized out of existence. We will though post a comment about the issues when the paperwork is published on their website.

These problems are all solvable if privatization is withdrawn and we revert to a public service healthcare model based on publicly funded and publicly delivered care as the NHS was founded. Fortunately, the original NHS model of healthcare happens to be the most cost-efficient model of care. The privatization and cuts that have plagued our NHS for two decades have robbed us of what was judged the best healthcare in the world in 2014 by the Commonwealth Fund, a US charity that surveys health systems each year.

We work to restore the NHS like the Women’s Cooperative Guild fought to found universal healthcare a century ago. Remember that they won!

Yes, it will require investment to Repair and Restore the NHS. However, that investment will repay itself in the health of the population and in enriching the economy.

“… spending on the NHS should be regarded as an investment, not a cost. Improving population health can drive higher levels of economic growth across the country.” https://www.nhsconfed.org/publications/analysis-link-between-investing-health-and-economic-growth

Even the World Bank a leading light in the world of global capitalism agrees. It said good population health, nutrition, and education create the foundation for sustainable economic growth. It is now much better understood that a well-educated, healthy, and well-nourished workforce pays bigger dividends to the economy than simply building new roads and bridges. 

Please tell us what the key issues in healthcare are for you. These are some issues we want to highlight ahead of the ICB meeting., but you may have issues we don’t yet know about.

Do come along if you are free on the 25th of January to this meeting with your questions and /or to support the campaign.

These are healthcare issues that we know are facing us in Cheshire and Merseyside healthcare.

  1. Deeper privatization and structural change to allow such privatization. It is now even easier for the ICB to give contracts to private companies without going through public procedures. GP practices can be bought and sold. See below. NHS campaigners are monitoring how much ICB spends is given to big corporations. For more information on just two companies see this. Privatization means not only does our healthcare have to pay profit on top of cost but the companies are, by law, aiming to make the the highest profit, not providing the highest care, and each company is likely to be taken over by another company particularly hedge funds or the huge US health corporations. Privatization of public services is a disaster.
  2. Reduction of services. The NHS /ICB has fewer beds and fewer doctors per head of population than comparable countries. The Kings Fund wrote in a comparison study of health care in advanced economies”The UK also has fewer hospital beds; 2.5 beds per 1,000 people, compared to an average of 3.2 beds per 1,000 in our basket. Again, fewer beds are not necessarily bad – this could reflect shorter hospital stays – but the high occupancy rates of beds in the UK (88 percent in 2022/23, above recommended levels, and third highest in our basket) implies there is a shortage.” Local hospitals have been way above 88 percent bed occupancy this year. The Royal College of Emergency Medicine said the huge loss of beds since 2010-11 was causing “real patient harm” and a “serious patient safety crisis”.“Since 2010-11 the NHS has lost 25,000 beds across the UK, as a result, bed occupancy has risen, ambulance response times have risen, A&E waiting times have increased, cancelled elective care operations have increased.“
  3.  Greater problems with underfunding. The extent of Cuts ( CIPs) is dreadful, especially in this time of high inflation. Hospitals are given a budget by the ICB and have to show where they are going to make”Cost Improvements”. Reducing the service, though, is part and parcel of the ICS model imported from the USA. Each hospital is expected to make CIPs/cuts of about 5%. These are utterly unrealistic without causing still more preventable deaths, and the rules are saying the cuts must be replicable next year too with more cuts again. The NHS is underfunded and the strikes have cost money. The government could have settled the disputes for much less than the disputes have cost, but still refused to settle the disputes or to fund the costs to the hospitals. This all means longer waiting lists longer queues in Accident and Emergency and longer waits for ambulances. The BMA said last year“ Between 2009/10 and 2021/22, the cumulative underspend – the difference between what funding would have been if historical growth rates had been maintained, and what was actually provided – reached £322 billion in real terms.“
  4. The introduction of physician associates and other less qualified roles to replace doctors’ roles. https://www.bma.org.uk/bma-media-centre/bma-calls-for-immediate-pause-on-recruitment-of-physician-associates Although some PAs have been in place for some time the government is bringing in more lower-skilled staff rather than train and pay doctors.  We have seen the growth of other roles in General Practice. but this has not solved the problems. Pharmacists have proven useful but even The safest system is for patients first to see a qualified physician and then to be referred to a nurse or other health professional.  When we go for treatment we need to know how qualified the member of staff is. There is a consultation from the British Medical Association that you can take part in here. Margaret Greenwood MP for Wirral West spoke in Parliament about this. Her contribution can be found here.
  5. Our people in our working-class communities already die too young as shown in this report from Liverpool City Council. This class divide in health care is replicated across Cheshire and Merseyside with huge differences in life expectancy and life expectancy in good health between the rich and poor. The differences in health between different areas across Cheshire and Merseyside are stark and heartbreaking but we want better services for people in Walton and Woolton, for Crewe and Macclesfield the poorer and better-off areas of Cheshire and Merseyside. This country can provide far better healthcare for all. Our Government chooses not to do so. The slightly better-off communities are not the cause of the extreme poverty that has returned to this country.
  6. NHS Staff pay and conditions. Our area has had the greatest involvement of healthcare workers in industrial action. They deserve our full solidarity and they still have not got a fair deal. Fair pay and good working conditions for staff at every level are requirements of an effective health service. nationally 112,000 vacancies are unfilled. For more details on staffing see this.
  7. A separate dispute at Arrowe Parke Hospital over back pay and grading is dragging on, with 100 or more pickets out in the cold winter. This strike is making history. The courage and determination are a model for others to follow.
  8. The proportion of the NHS budget spent on General Practice is due to fall to its lowest point in at least eight years. We need better GP services.
  9. Meanwhile, Centene the US health corporation is selling  60 GP practices to another company! HCRG is the entity that replaced Virgin Health when 75% of the shares were bought out in 2021 by Twenty20 Capital, which is a British-owned private equity group. So our GP practices are now at the mercy of the market! ( Thanks to research from Note by Carol Saunders (Tower Hamlets KONP & NELSON)
  10. The situation at Liverpool Women’s Hospital continues to cause concern. It is part of the national maternity scandal, although Liverpool Women’s is fortunate to have a full staff of midwives, albeit as measured by the government’s meager staffing levels. We need more midwives but are very pleased to see the new young midwives arrive at the hospital and we hope that they stay for many years. Midwives need respect, good pay, good working conditions, and access to ongoing professional education. The new Chief Executive of Liverpool Women’s Hospital said “.. the organization was well organized, and there were limited opportunities for further internally driven efficiencies to reduce the financial deficit position. Work would therefore need to continue to influence the national maternity tariff and the CNST premium – both significant cost pressures to the Trust.” He also said, according to the December Trust Board minutes, “The RQR meeting had also provided an opportunity for the Trust to outline significant safety issues that required immediate action. This included 24/7 obstetric cover, development of a Medical Emergency Team (MET), blood bank availability, anesthetic cover, and ongoing work on the antiracism agenda.” despite this, the hospital is expected to make significant CIPs( cuts)
  11. Money given for dentistry cannot be spent because of changes to the service contracts for dentists, yet thousands go without. The NHS  is on course for  £400m underspend on its dental contract!!
  12. Waiting lists. The waiting lists for hospital treatment rose to a record of 7.8 million in November 2023 and this winter has not made things better.
  13. Allowing Palantir access to our most personal data. We are told it is not yet happening here but that train is rolling. NHS is paying the company a huge sum of £480 million for this service which will give the company access to data worth billions and which will further enrich the health insurance conglomerates and big Pharma. They will administer a key system for the NHS, and the Post Office Horizon scandal tells us just how important it is that such systems work well for the users, not those who want to make a profit. For further details on this issue see https://www.foxglove.org.uk/2024/01/11/nhs-federated-data-platform-need-to-know/
  14. Stress and pain for patients and staff are caused by the deliberate policies of this government and all who support NHS restructuring for profit rather than care. We thank the staff who have been the best protectors of our care and point the blame squarely on this and earlier governments.
  15. Pharmaceuticals. Too many patients cannot get the medication they need. Chasing around different chemists has become familiar.” Multinational health corporations are raking in huge profits while demanding the UK’s National Health Service pay high prices for their products. The excessive power wielded by these firms needs curbing if UK health policy is to truly work in the public interest.” says author Nick Deardon. The NHS once had, and could have again, a powerful position in buying from big companies as the world’s biggest single purchaser. The scale of big pharma gives them huge power. There is a powerful campaign being run on this issue which you can contact here
  16. The use of and cost of agency staff is a waste of money. We know that staff sometimes need flexible working especially with the poor level of NHS pay and the huge cost of childcare. The shortage of staff has become another way for big businesses to rip off the health service. In 2017 the government sold off NHS Professionals. The Canary paper wrote at the time“The DoH owns NHS Professionals (NHSP), a private limited company created to supply a bank of over 90,000 medical staff across different NHS Trusts. The flexible arrangements apparently save the government £70m a year in costs while non-government-owned private staffing agencies can be around 30% more expensive.” HCRG, remember them from the private sale of GP practices earlier in the article ( point 8 )? Well, they are one of the agencies cashing in in NHS funds through agency staff.
  17. The Royal College of Nurses reported “Findings from a Freedom of Information (FOI) request to NHS trusts in England expose a total of £3.2bn spent on agency staff by hospitals between 2020 and 2022.…..According to RCN analysis, three-quarters of nursing vacancies in the NHS in England could be filled if the money had been redirected to hiring permanent staff. Cash spent on agencies could cover the salaries of 30,956 permanent full-time equivalent nurses paid at the top of a Band 5 salary (£34,581).
Last time we lobbied the ICB in New Brighton
The October 2023 Demonstration for the Liverpool Women’s Hospital and to Repair and Restore the NHS.
Additional staff in GP practices since 2019https://www.nuffieldtrust.org.uk/news-item/more-staff-in-general-practice-but-is-the-emerging-mix-of-roles-what-s-needed