Eight Miles Sounds Small. Try It On Narrow Country Roads.
Southport and Ormskirk are ten miles apart on narrow rural roads — and the families who'll feel every one of those miles are already telling us what the map doesn't show.
Look at a map and eight miles looks like nothing. Ask a parent who's actually driven it and you get a different answer.
What the map doesn't show
Southport and Ormskirk hospitals sit ten miles apart along narrow rural roads, not motorway. Philip Gillian, a parent from Skelmersdale, told reporters the journey to Southport would be “probably 45 minutes drive, easily” — and that's before you add a school run, a tractor, or rush-hour traffic through Burscough and Rufford. Forty-five minutes is not what “eight miles further” sounds like on paper. It's what it actually is, for a family driving it with a sick child in the back seat.
Elizabeth, who is pregnant and has a son prone to allergic reactions, put it more simply: “To go to Southport, it's miles away. How are we supposed to get there so quickly?” Another local parent, Daniela Slater, said what worries her isn't the distance on paper — it's the extra time it would actually take to get there when it matters.
This isn't just Skelmersdale's problem
The same roads run through Burscough, Rufford and Halsall too. None of these villages have a motorway shortcut to Southport. They have B-roads, level crossings, and the same rural traffic every West Lancashire parent already plans around — except now they'd be planning around it with their child's emergency care, not a supermarket run.
West Lancashire MP Ashley Dalton has said her constituents feel “left behind” by a decision that treats ten miles of country road the same as ten miles of dual carriageway. It isn't. And Ormskirk's children's A&E is still 10–20 minutes closer than Southport to the specialist units at Alder Hey, Whiston and Aintree that the sickest children get sent on to.
What we're asking for
7,840+ people responded to the official consultation, and keeping the children's A&E at Ormskirk was the option most of them wanted. The Health Secretary has the power to call in this decision. We're asking them to look at the actual roads West Lancashire families would have to drive — not the straight line on a map — before they let it go ahead.
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