Who picks up the pieces? 999, 111 and our GPs
Move our children's A&E eight miles away and the slack doesn't vanish — it lands on ambulances already running at nearly double their target, on NHS 111, and on our GPs.
A worried parent at 2am doesn't stop needing help because the children's A&E moved to Southport. The need doesn't disappear. It just goes somewhere else.
That's the bit nobody in charge wants to talk about.
Where the pressure goes
When your nearest children's A&E gets further away, three things happen. More parents dial 999, because an eight-mile journey with a fitting or struggling-to-breathe child feels impossible. More parents ring NHS 111 and hope. And more turn up at the GP surgery with problems a children's emergency department should be handling.
None of those services has room to spare.
The ambulances are already stretched
The national standard says a Category 2 emergency call — that's strokes, sepsis, serious breathing problems — should get an ambulance in an average of 18 minutes. In May 2026, the actual average across England was 29 minutes and 13 seconds, and one in ten waited nearly an hour. Across the whole of 2025/26 the average was just under 30 minutes.
And when an ambulance does arrive at hospital, it's supposed to hand the patient over within 15 minutes. By March 2026 the average handover was running at around 26 minutes — and in the worst winter periods more than a third of handovers took over half an hour.
Every extra 999 call this decision creates joins that queue. Every ambulance doing a longer run to Southport is an ambulance not available for the next call in West Lancashire.
111 and GPs can't absorb it either
NHS 111 already sends roughly half its callers towards primary care — a GP appointment that has to actually exist. Researchers at the University of Sheffield found that when primary care can't respond in time, patients do the obvious thing: they call 999 or go to A&E anyway. The National Audit Office has separately reported a growing share of 111 calls ending in advice to attend A&E.
So the plan is: take away the local children's A&E, and lean on services that are already overflowing back into A&E. That isn't a system. That's a circle.
We love the doctors, nurses and paramedics who hold all this together. Our fight is not with them. It's with the decision-makers who ran a consultation, heard 7,840 of us say keep children's emergency care at Ormskirk, and pressed on anyway.
What we're asking for
Lancashire County Council's health scrutiny committee voted unanimously to ask the Health Secretary to call this decision in. That request is still sitting unanswered. The Health Secretary must formally call in this decision before a single brick is moved. Sign the petition. Share this. Keep the pressure on.
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