The NHS's Own Verdict: Busiest Summer On Record — And They Still Want Our Kids Sent Further Away
NHS England's own figures, published this month, confirm the busiest summer for A&E care in the health service's history — proof there is no spare capacity to absorb our children's emergency care eight miles down the road.
While the campaign to keep our children's A&E at Ormskirk was still waiting on an answer nobody has given, NHS England quietly published something that should worry every parent in West Lancashire: this summer was the busiest the health service has ever recorded for emergency care.
The numbers NHS England published about itself
According to NHS England's own report on summer 2026 performance, hospitals in England saw 7,268,445 A&E attendances across June, July and August — a record for the summer period, and more than 240,000 higher than the same three months the year before (7,027,384). Staff still managed to see, treat or discharge 5,462,182 people within four hours, also a record — but a record set chasing a bigger, faster wave. Ambulance crews answered 2,455,833 call-outs over the same period, up more than 130,000 on the year before.
What the strain looks like underneath the headline
Records at the top can hide the picture underneath. A separate analysis of NHS England's own data found that in June 2026 alone, 49,466 patients across England waited 12 or more hours for a hospital bed after doctors had already decided they needed one — up 28% on June 2025 (38,683). Only 61.2% of major A&E patients nationally were seen within the four-hour standard that month, and at 14 of England's 121 hospital trusts, fewer than half of patients were.
That is the system our children's emergency care is being pushed into. Alder Hey, Whiston and Aintree — the specialist centres Ormskirk's children currently reach 10 to 20 minutes faster than Southport does — are part of that same stretched national picture. Adding eight extra miles of travel time for a sick or injured child, into a system already missing its own targets, is not a neutral change. It is a risk, and nobody who approved it has had to explain why it is worth taking.
Let's be precise
Ormskirk Hospital is not closing. What's changing is the children's A&E, currently open 8am to midnight, which the 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 with a minimum three-year build, targeted for 2029. That decision 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 over 7,840 responses, and even though NHS bosses had named Southport their "preferred option" before that consultation ever opened.
More than six months on from that vote, 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. West Lancashire MP Ashley Dalton has separately asked for the decision to be reversed. Silence isn't a decision. It's a delay that leaves the plan on track by default.
We love the doctors and nurses who look after our kids at Ormskirk. Our fight isn't with them — it's with the people who named their preferred option before they'd asked us, then went quiet when we answered.
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 NHS England's own summer figures show about the system this move would lean on.
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