Minutes matter: moving our children's A&E 8 miles further away is a safety risk
In a real emergency, the time it takes to reach specialist care can decide the outcome. Ormskirk sits closer, not further, to the centres that save children's lives.
When your child is fighting to breathe, won't wake up, or has been in a serious accident, one thing matters more than almost anything else: how fast they reach the right care.
Emergency medicine has a name for it — the golden hour. The principle is simple and well established: in trauma, in stroke, in the sickest emergencies, outcomes get worse with every minute lost. That is not campaign spin. It is why we have ambulances with blue lights.
Ormskirk is closer to the centres that matter
Here is the fact the decision-makers keep skating over. When a child is critically ill, the destination that counts is often not the local A&E at all — it is a specialist centre: Alder Hey for children, Whiston for major trauma, Aintree for stroke and emergency care.
Ormskirk sits 10 to 20 minutes closer to those centres than Southport. Moving the front door of children's emergency care further from the specialist centres, not closer, is the opposite of a safety improvement.
'Reconfiguration' is not the same as 'safer'
The NHS calls this a reconfiguration. For a parent at 2am it is a longer drive with a frightened child in the back seat, more pressure on 999, and minutes you do not get back.
What we're asking for
We are not against change that genuinely makes children safer. We are against a change that moves emergency care further from the specialist centres — decided after a consultation the public had already won.
The Health Secretary can call this decision in before a single brick is moved. That is what we are asking for.
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