Flu Season Starts For Our Kids — Our Children's A&E Still Shuts At Midnight
The NHS is racing to vaccinate children against flu before winter hits — while Ormskirk's children's A&E has run on cut hours since 2020, and ministers still haven't said whether they'll stop it moving further away.
Term's back. The nights are drawing in. And this week the NHS quietly started something that tells you everything about how seriously it takes what's coming: it began vaccinating our children against flu a full month before anyone else gets their jab.
From 1 September 2026, children aged 2 and 3, every child from reception to Year 11, and children with health conditions became eligible for their flu vaccine — weeks ahead of the general adult programme, which doesn't start until 1 October. NHS England's own reasoning is that immunity fades, so children need protecting early to be covered when winter admissions climb. This is the NHS preparing, months in advance, for the exact season when children's emergency departments come under the most strain.
The hours are already cut
While the NHS braces for winter demand, Ormskirk's children's A&E has been running on reduced hours since 2020 — open 8am to midnight, closed overnight. That's not a future change. That's now, every night, already. Overnight, a sick or injured child in Ormskirk is already being sent further afield. The plan approved in March would go further: move the whole service to Southport, 8 miles away, permanently.
Bronchiolitis and RSV are the classic reason small children end up in hospital over winter — a peer-reviewed birth-cohort study of English admissions found that 70–82% of bronchiolitis admissions in under-5s could be attributed to RSV. That's the age group already routed away from Ormskirk overnight, and the age group this move affects most directly.
Minutes still matter
Ormskirk sits 10–20 minutes closer than Southport to the specialist children's centres at Alder Hey, Whiston and Aintree — exactly the hospitals a poorly child from Ormskirk, Skelmersdale, Burscough or Tarleton may need reaching in a hurry. Every extra mile is extra minutes, and winter is when those minutes are least forgiving.
We love the doctors and nurses who keep Ormskirk's A&E running under these hours. Our fight isn't with them — it's with the decision-makers who approved this move after 7,840+ people responded to a public consultation, and after keeping the children's A&E at Ormskirk came out as the most popular option. NHS bosses had already named Southport their preferred option before a single response was read.
Lancashire County Council's health scrutiny committee voted unanimously, cross-party, back in March to ask the Health Secretary to call in this decision. Six months on, that request still hasn't been answered — while the NHS itself is already gearing up for winter.
What we're asking for
The Health Secretary must formally call in this decision before any work begins on moving our children's A&E to Southport. Our kids deserve an answer before winter arrives — not after.
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