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.