Nine days to the summer holidays — peak injury season for our kids
Lancashire schools break up on 20 July — the start of the six-week stretch when children's A&E visits peak, and the very demand NHS bosses plan to send eight miles away.
In nine days, the school gates close. Six weeks of bikes, trampolines, paddling pools and climbing frames begin. It's the best time of year to be a kid in West Lancashire — and the busiest time of year for a children's A&E.
Summer is when kids get hurt
This isn't guesswork. Lancashire schools break up on 20 July, with the summer holidays running to 31 August. And the safety data is blunt about what happens next. The Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents says most child accidents happen in summer, during school holidays and at weekends — and more than 2 million children under 15 end up in A&E every year after accidents in and around the home.
A six-year study at a major UK paediatric trauma centre found child injury attendances peak in the summer months, when long daylight and school holidays put kids outdoors. The same study found trampoline-related child injuries rose 118% in six years. Every parent on our estates knows exactly what a garden trampoline plus six weeks of freedom adds up to.
The hours match. The plan doesn't.
Ormskirk's children's A&E runs 8am to midnight. RoSPA's data says child accidents cluster in the late afternoon and early evening — exactly the window Ormskirk covers, every single day of the holidays.
So picture the last week of July. A ten-year-old comes off the trampoline at 5pm with a bent wrist. Right now, for families in Ormskirk, Burscough, Skelmersdale and the villages, help is minutes away. Under the plan signed off in March, that same child travels eight miles further to Southport — at the exact time of year, and the exact time of day, when children need emergency care most.
They were told all of this
More than 7,840 of us responded to the consultation. Keeping the children's A&E at Ormskirk was the most popular option — and the NHS had named Southport as its preferred option before the consultation even began. In late March, Lancashire County Council's health scrutiny committee voted unanimously, cross-party, to ask the Health Secretary to call the decision in. That request is still unanswered.
We love the doctors and nurses at Ormskirk. Our fight is with the decision-makers who heard all of this and signed off a £33 million move anyway.
What we're asking for
The Health Secretary must formally call in this decision before any work begins. Our kids will spend this summer — and the next, and the one after — falling off bikes and trampolines the way kids always have. They deserve a children's A&E that stays close to home.
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