They're Moving Our Kids' A&E Further From Alder Hey
When a child is critically ill, the road runs to the specialists at Alder Hey and Whiston — and Southport is the wrong direction.
Ask any parent round here where the sickest children end up. Not Ormskirk. Not Southport. Alder Hey.
That's how it should be. A local children's A&E does the first, vital work — then the specialists take over. So the distance between our kids' A&E and those specialist hospitals matters. A lot.
The road to the specialists
When a child is critically ill, a dedicated NHS team — the North West and North Wales Paediatric Transport Service (NWTS), run jointly by Alder Hey and Royal Manchester Children's Hospital — moves them from the local hospital to intensive care. It runs 24/7, and for time-critical transfers it works to a 180-minute standard from the moment the child is accepted. Every extra minute of road eats into that clock.
Here's the fact the decision-makers don't put on their slides: Ormskirk is 10–20 minutes closer than Southport to the specialist centres at Alder Hey, Whiston and Aintree. Moving our children's A&E to Southport moves it the wrong way — further from the very hospitals our sickest children depend on.
The NHS's own trauma network says delay costs
The North West Children's Major Trauma Network takes badly injured children straight to Alder Hey or Royal Manchester wherever possible. Why? In the network's own words: because transfers from a local hospital "incur delays to treatment and could have adverse effects on survival." Their words, not ours. The NHS's own experts say minutes between hospitals matter.
Two journeys, both longer
Move the A&E to Southport and our families pay twice. First journey: further from home to reach children's emergency care at all. Second journey: if your child then needs Alder Hey or Whiston, the ambulance sets off from a hospital that's further from the specialists than the one we already have. Eight miles the wrong direction — at both ends of the worst day of your life.
Let's be precise, because precision matters: Ormskirk Hospital is not closing. But its children's A&E — the service 7,840+ of us fought to keep here — is being moved to Southport, at a cost of £33 million, after a consultation where keeping it at Ormskirk was the most popular answer. And we love the doctors and nurses at Ormskirk. Our fight is with the decision-makers who named Southport as their preferred option before the consultation even opened.
What we're asking for
Lancashire County Council's health scrutiny committee voted unanimously, cross-party, to ask the Health Secretary to call this decision in. Our MP asked for it to be reversed. That request is still unanswered.
So we ask again, as parents: call in this decision before any work begins. Look at the map. Look at where the specialists are. Then tell us moving our children's A&E further from Alder Hey makes our kids safer.
Sign the petition. Share this with another parent. Keep the pressure on.
Spread the word — share this briefing: