Our kids, by the numbers: who actually loses this A&E
Nearly 27,000 children live in West Lancashire — and their nearest children's A&E is being moved 8 miles away.
Here's a number the decision-makers never say out loud: 26,703.
That's roughly how many children and young people (aged 0–19) live in West Lancashire, according to the 2021 census. Twenty-six thousand families. And their nearest children's A&E is being moved 8 miles away to Southport.
We keep hearing about "reconfiguration" and "pathways" and "preferred options". So let's talk about the people. Not units. Not flow. Kids.
The scale of what we're losing
West Lancashire has 57 primary schools, teaching 9,207 primary-age children in 2024/25. Every one of those children has a family who, right now, knows that if the worst happens on a weekday afternoon, Ormskirk's children's A&E is minutes away.
That's not an abstraction to a parent. It's the difference between a service you can reach in a panic and one you can't.
And this isn't a service nobody uses. It's the nearest emergency front door for tens of thousands of local children — and the decision-makers want to put another town between our kids and it.
They already know how many of us there are
Here's what makes this harder to swallow. The NHS ran a 13-week consultation last year. More than 7,840 people responded. Keeping the children's A&E at Ormskirk was the most popular option. They had the numbers. They had our answer. They chose Southport anyway — a "preferred option" named before anyone was asked.
To be precise, because precision protects our case: the hospital is not closing. Ormskirk keeps other services. But the children's A&E — the bit our families rely on in an emergency — is being moved to Southport, at a cost of £33 million, over a minimum of three years.
We love the doctors and nurses at Ormskirk. This was never a fight with them. It's a fight with the people who counted 7,840 of us and looked away.
What we're asking for
The maths is simple. Tens of thousands of local children. One nearest children's A&E. A consultation that said keep it. And a decision that ignored all of it.
The Health Secretary must formally "call in" this decision before any work begins. Lancashire County Council's health scrutiny committee has already asked for exactly that — unanimously, across every party. West Lancashire's MP has asked for it too. That request is still sitting unanswered in Whitehall.
Twenty-six thousand children are worth an answer. Sign the petition. Share this. Make it impossible to ignore us a second time.
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