NHS England's Own Winter Plan Says “Closer To Home.” Ours Is Moving Further Away.
NHS England's winter 2026/27 guidance tells hospitals to treat people closer to home wherever possible. The plan for our children's A&E does the opposite.
Every autumn, NHS England sends hospitals a letter telling them how to get through winter. This year's letter landed with a line worth reading twice: integrated care boards must plan so that “people are treated closer to home wherever possible.”
That's the official winter strategy. Meanwhile, the plan for Ormskirk's children's A&E does the opposite — moving it 8 miles further from the families who currently use it.
What the guidance actually asks for
NHS England's winter planning letter for 2026/27 tells local health systems to carry out “a whole-area demand and capacity analysis with robust planning assumptions, tested against surge and extreme surge scenarios,” and to lean on primary care, community services and local capacity so fewer people end up in an emergency department in the first place. It also sets a 15-minute handover target for ambulances arriving at hospital, and credits early planning with making last winter "the best in 3 years for 4-hour performance and ambulance response times."
None of that is campaign language. It's NHS England telling its own hospitals what good winter planning looks like: keep care local, plan for surge, don't add strain to emergency departments that are already stretched.
Our decision runs the other way
Ormskirk's children's A&E already runs reduced hours — 8am to midnight, cut back since 2020 — and sits 10 to 20 minutes closer than Southport to the specialist centres at Alder Hey, Whiston and Aintree that the sickest children get sent on to. Moving it doesn't bring it closer to home for a single family in West Lancashire. It takes emergency care that's already local and puts it further away, right as NHS England is telling every other part of the system to do the opposite.
We're not claiming Ormskirk Hospital is closing — it isn't, and that distinction matters. But "closer to home wherever possible" is the NHS's own test for good winter planning, and this decision fails it for every family whose nearest children's A&E is about to get harder to reach.
What we're asking for
Before this winter's planning is signed off, someone should have to explain how moving a children's A&E eight miles further from the families who use it squares with NHS England's own instruction to keep care closer to home. Until the Health Secretary calls in this decision, that question has no answer — and neither, five months on, does the call-in request itself. We love the doctors and nurses at Ormskirk and at Southport. Our fight is with a decision that ignored 7,840 of us and now sits at odds with the NHS's own winter rulebook.
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