Move It Eight Miles, And Some Sick Children Just Won't Make The Trip
A peer-reviewed study of 1.4 million A&E visits found that every extra kilometre to hospital cuts children's attendance — and hits poorer families hardest.
Some parents won't make the trip.
Not because their child isn't sick enough. Not because they don't care. Because the extra miles, the extra bus, the extra hour they don't have get in the way — and a child who needed to be seen, isn't. That's not our fear talking. That's a peer-reviewed study of over a million A&E visits.
What the evidence actually shows
A study published in PLOS ONE (Rudge et al., 2013) analysed 1,413,363 A&E attendances across a population of 5.4 million people in central England. It found that every extra kilometre between home and hospital cut predicted child attendances by 2.2% — a statistically significant effect (95% CI 1.7–2.6%, p<0.001). Adult attendance dropped too, but by less.
The same study found something sharper: the drop-off with distance was steeper in deprived neighbourhoods than in well-off ones, and more pronounced for children than adults. In other words, moving a children's A&E further away doesn't affect every family equally. It's the families already stretched thin — no car, no easy bus route, no spare hour — who are most likely to simply not go.
Why that matters here
West Lancashire is home to around 19,435 children aged 0–15 — 16.3% of the district's population (ONS mid-2022 estimates). Many of those families live in Skelmersdale, Tarleton, Banks and Halsall — places where the car isn't a given and the bus isn't frequent. For them, "8 miles further to Southport" isn't an abstraction. It's the extra leg of a journey some won't be able to make at 2am with a frightened child and no lift.
We're not saying families won't try. Most will move heaven and earth for their kids. But the evidence says some won't get there in time — or won't go at all — and it says the burden falls hardest on the families with the least to spare. That's not a side effect the joint committee weighed when it approved this move on 13 March 2026. It's not something the 13-week consultation — where keeping the children's A&E at Ormskirk was the most popular outcome — was allowed to change either.
We love the doctors and nurses at Ormskirk. Our fight isn't with them. It's with a decision that was preferred before the public ever had a say, and that a cross-party scrutiny committee has already asked the Health Secretary to call in.
What we're asking for
We're asking the Health Secretary to formally call in this decision before a single spade goes into the ground. Evidence like this — not slogans, not guesswork — is exactly what a call-in review exists to weigh. Our kids' A&E should stay reachable for every family in West Lancashire, not just the ones with a car in the drive.
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