Busiest Winter On Record. Worst Time To Move Our Kids' A&E.
The NHS just came through its busiest winter ever — so why move our children's emergency care eight miles further away?
Our children don't choose when to get ill. It's 2am in February, a fever spiking, a cough that won't settle, and you need help fast. That moment is what this whole fight is about.
Last winter broke every record
The NHS has just come through what it officially calls the busiest winter on record. In January 2026 alone, A&E departments in England saw 2,320,266 attendances — 4.6% more than the January before. Ambulance crews faced a record number of incidents across December and January. Across the winter, just 73.5% of patients were seen within four hours — well short of the 95% standard the NHS is meant to hit. On top of that, hospitals were caring for more than a thousand flu patients a day.
Winter is exactly when local emergency care matters most. It's when roads ice over, when buses run late, when a poorly child simply can't wait.
So why make the journey longer?
On 13 March 2026, a joint committee of two NHS boards approved moving Ormskirk Hospital's children's A&E to Southport — eight miles away — at a cost of £33 million. Our children's A&E already runs on reduced hours, 8am to midnight, cut back "temporarily" in 2020 and never restored.
Now the plan is to move it out of town altogether. On a normal night that's an extra journey. On a record-breaking winter night, when every hospital in the country is stretched thin, those extra miles and minutes are the gap between quick reassurance and a frightening wait.
We love the doctors and nurses at Ormskirk. Our fight isn't with them — it's with the decision-makers who ran a consultation, heard 7,840 of us say keep the children's A&E at Ormskirk, and pressed ahead anyway.
Distance doesn't take a season off
The people who made this call won't be driving a feverish toddler across town at midnight in January. We will. A children's A&E is either near enough to reach in an emergency, or it isn't. Moving it eight miles away doesn't make our kids safer — it makes every winter harder.
What we're asking for
The Health Secretary must formally call in this decision before any work begins. Lancashire County Council's health scrutiny committee has already voted unanimously, across every party, to ask for exactly that. That request is still sitting unanswered in Whitehall. Answer it — and keep our children's A&E where our children can actually reach it.
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