The Busiest Summer On Record - And They Still Want To Move Us Further Away
NHS England just confirmed the busiest summer for A&E on record - and the hospitals they want to send our kids to were already buckling under it.
This summer broke every record NHS England keeps for A&E demand. Not a good record. The one that tells you how stretched the system already is.
What the new figures actually say
Between June and August 2026, A&E departments across England saw 7,268,445 attendances - a record for that period, and over 240,000 more than the same three months in 2025 (7,027,384). Ambulance crews were called out 2,455,833 times, more than 130,000 up on last year. Even the number of patients treated, admitted or discharged within four hours hit a record high - 5,462,182 - but that's out of a record-breaking total, so a huge share still didn't make it in time.
That's the backdrop against which someone, somewhere, decided the right moment to move our children's A&E eight miles further away - into a system already running this hot - was fine.
Why that matters for Ormskirk
Our core argument hasn't changed, and neither have the numbers behind it: Ormskirk is 10 to 20 minutes closer than Southport to the specialist children's centres at Alder Hey, Whiston and Aintree. Every one of those hospitals sits inside the same stretched national system these new figures describe. Adding load to a system already breaking demand records doesn't make the demand disappear - it just moves the nearest help further from the families who need it fastest.
We love the doctors and nurses keeping Ormskirk's current 8am-to-midnight children's A&E running under pressure like this. Our fight isn't with them. It's with the people who approved a £33 million move away from the option 7,840+ of us said we wanted in the consultation - then watched a scrutiny committee vote unanimously, cross-party, to ask for it to be called in, and got silence back.
What we're asking for
We're not asking for a miracle. We're asking the Health Secretary to do the one thing only he can do: call in this decision before a single brick is laid, and look properly at what a record-breaking summer for NHS emergency care means for a plan to make emergency care harder to reach for the children of West Lancashire.
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