Same Health Board, Two Answers: One A&E May Get Its Nights Back. Ours Is Moving Away.
The same NHS board weighing up giving Chorley's A&E its overnight service back is the board that voted to move our children's A&E to Southport.
Twenty-five miles up the road from Ormskirk, there's a hospital whose A&E story should sound familiar.
Chorley and South Ribble Hospital ran a 24-hour A&E until April 2016, when staff shortages forced it to close overnight. It's operated part-time ever since — and for a decade, local people have fought to get the night shift back: marches, petitions, a parliamentary petition, none of it forgotten.
This month, that fight got a genuine answer. Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust completed a feasibility study and found, in the words of Health Secretary James Murray, an "evidence-based case to explore extending" Chorley's A&E back to 24 hours. That work is now being developed with NHS Lancashire and South Cumbria Integrated Care Board.
Read that again: the evidence says extend it. Explore it. Give it back.
The same board, a different hospital
NHS Lancashire and South Cumbria ICB is not a stranger to us. It's the same board that sat jointly with NHS Cheshire and Merseyside ICBs on 13 March 2026 and voted to move our children's A&E out of Ormskirk to Southport — 8 miles away, at a cost of £33 million, for a minimum of three years.
The difference isn't the evidence. It's what happened to it.
At Chorley, a feasibility study looked at the facts and the answer was: there's a case to give people more. At Ormskirk, a 13-week public consultation drew 7,840+ responses, and keeping our children's A&E right here was the most popular option — before the NHS had even named Southport as its "preferred option," before keeping both sites was ruled out. The evidence pointed the same way it did at Chorley. It just wasn't followed.
What we're not saying
We're not against Chorley getting its night shift back. Good. Every family near there deserves what we're fighting for here. We love the doctors and nurses doing their jobs at both hospitals — our fight has never been with them.
But we are asking the obvious question: if this board can look at evidence in Chorley and move towards more care, why did the same board look at evidence in Ormskirk and move away from it?
What we're asking for
Lancashire County Council's health scrutiny committee voted unanimously, cross-party, to ask the Health Secretary to call in the Ormskirk decision. That request is still unanswered. Chorley shows evidence-led decisions are possible from this exact board. We're asking for the same treatment: call in the decision, and let the evidence — not a preferred option chosen before anyone was asked — decide what happens to our children's A&E.
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