Every Minute An Ambulance Queues Outside A&E Is A Minute It Isn't Coming Back For The Next Call
Nationally, ambulance crews still lose tens of thousands of hours a month queuing outside A&E before they can even hand over a patient — moving our children's emergency care eight miles further away adds strain at both ends of that queue.
Nobody plans for the ambulance to be the bottleneck. But before a paramedic crew can go home, refuel, or answer the next 999 call, they first have to hand their patient over to A&E staff. When A&E is full, that handover queues — and the crew queues with it, stuck on a forecourt instead of out covering the next emergency.
What the national figures show
According to the Nuffield Trust's analysis of NHS England's own Ambulance Quality Indicators, around 23% of ambulance handovers in England took longer than 30 minutes in March 2026 — down from a peak of 37% in December 2024, but still nearly one in four. About 5% took over an hour. The average handover across England that month was roughly 26 minutes. Winter is worse than spring, but the queue never fully disappears.
Why that matters for a move to Southport
This isn't only about how long it takes an ambulance to reach a sick child — though Ormskirk is already 10 to 20 minutes closer than Southport to the specialist centres at Alder Hey, Whiston and Aintree. It's about what happens after it arrives. A crew that queues to hand over at a busier hospital isn't back on the road for the next call in Burscough, Skelmersdale or Tarleton. Every extra mile and every extra minute stuck on a forecourt is time our area's 999 cover doesn't have. Moving children's emergency care further from where our kids live adds strain on both ends of that same journey — getting there, and the crew getting back.
Let's be precise
Ormskirk Hospital is not closing. What's changing is the children's A&E, currently open 8am to midnight, which a joint committee of NHS Lancashire & South Cumbria and NHS Cheshire & Merseyside voted on 13 March 2026 to move eight miles to Southport — a £33 million project, minimum three-year build, targeted for 2029. That went ahead even though keeping the children's A&E at Ormskirk was the most popular option in the 13-week public consultation that drew more than 7,840 responses, and even though NHS bosses had already named Southport their "preferred option" before that consultation opened. More than six months on, Lancashire County Council's cross-party health scrutiny committee is still waiting for an answer to the call-in request it voted unanimously to send the Health Secretary.
We love the doctors, nurses and paramedics keeping our kids safe under pressure like this every single day. Our fight isn't with them — it's with the people who moved the service further away without ever explaining what it does to the ambulance crews and the families relying on them.
What we're asking for
The Health Secretary must formally call in this decision before a single brick is laid — and look honestly at what it would do to ambulance cover across West Lancashire, not just to a map showing miles.
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