From Skelmersdale It's 10 Minutes to Ormskirk. It's Up to 26 to Southport.
For families in Skelmersdale, the journey to Southport is already more than double the journey to Ormskirk — and that's before anything moves.
We timed it. Not with a stopwatch and a sick child in the back seat — with the same route planners any parent would open at 2am. The numbers should worry you.
From Skelmersdale to Ormskirk Hospital, it's a 6-mile drive — about 10 minutes. From Skelmersdale to Southport Hospital, it's roughly 13 miles, and route planners put that at 21 to 26 minutes depending on the road you take [1][2]. That's not a rounding error. That's more than double the time, before you've even accounted for a slow start out of the drive, a screaming toddler, or rush-hour traffic on the A570.
Why the extra minutes matter more than they sound
Ambulance response times matter here too. The national standard for a Category 2 call — the category that covers most children's emergencies — is meant to average under 18 minutes. Right now that target is temporarily relaxed to an average of 30 minutes for 2025/26, with NHS England aiming to bring it back down to 25 minutes by March 2027 [3]. Every one of those minutes is spent getting help to a child. The minutes we're talking about here are spent getting a child to help — after the ambulance arrives, or instead of waiting for one because you've decided to drive yourself. Stack the two together and a Skelmersdale family already facing a slow ambulance response is then facing a much longer drive too.
This is Skelmersdale. It gets worse further out
Skelmersdale sits reasonably close to Ormskirk already — which is exactly why the extra distance to Southport stands out so clearly. Families further into West Lancashire, from Burscough to Tarleton to Halsall, are starting from journeys that are already longer than Skelmersdale's. Moving the children's A&E adds the same 8 extra miles between Ormskirk and Southport for every family in West Lancashire — on top of whatever distance they were already travelling just to reach Ormskirk in the first place.
None of this is about blaming the doctors and nurses who currently see our kids within minutes at Ormskirk. Our fight isn't with them. It's with the people who signed off on a plan that makes the journey longer for families who are often already stretched thin, at the exact moment a 13-week public consultation, which drew over 7,840 responses, told them plainly that keeping the children's A&E at Ormskirk was the most popular option on the table.
What we're asking for
We're not asking for a miracle. We're asking the Health Secretary to do what Lancashire County Council's cross-party health scrutiny committee already asked for: call in this decision before a single spade goes into the ground. Look again at the journey times. Look again at the consultation. Then decide whether an extra 10+ minutes on the road is a price West Lancashire families should have to pay.
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