Moving the Door Doesn't Remove the Demand
Shut a children's A&E door in Ormskirk and the same sick kids still turn up somewhere — just later, further away, and pushed through a GP and 999 system that's already stretched thin.
The maths nobody explains
Here's the bit the £33 million business case skates over: moving our children's A&E to Southport doesn't make a single sick child disappear. Every feverish toddler, every broken arm, every asthma attack in West Lancashire still needs care. The only thing that changes is which door they knock on, and how long they wait to get through it.
And right now, every other door is already jammed.
The system that's supposed to absorb the overflow
Latest NHS England figures show just 75.7% of A&E attendances in June 2026 were seen, admitted or discharged within four hours — against an official target of 78%. Over the year to May 2026, roughly 1.56 million people waited more than four hours in A&E across England. That's the backdrop against which NHS chiefs want to add an 8-mile round trip and a new layer of triage delay for Ormskirk families.
It's the same story before you even reach a hospital. When a children's A&E gets harder to reach, the pressure doesn't vanish — it lands on 999 and on GPs. And GPs have less and less room to absorb it: BMA analysis of practice data puts the average patient list per full-time-equivalent GP at 2,192 as of May 2026, part of a decade-long squeeze that has seen 1,470 independent GP practices close or merge across England since 2015. Nationally, over half of practices say the pressure is already hurting patient care.
What this means for our kids
Parents don't ring 999 or book a GP appointment for fun. They do it because their child is unwell and they need help fast. Every barrier we add between a frightened parent and a children's A&E pushes more of that anxiety onto an ambulance service and a GP surgery that are already under strain. Ormskirk's children's A&E runs 8am to midnight and sits 10–20 minutes closer than Southport to the specialist units at Alder Hey, Whiston and Aintree that our sickest kids sometimes need. Move it, and we don't just add miles — we add a weak link at the exact moment it matters most.
The joint committee that signed this off in March knew the public wanted the children's A&E kept at Ormskirk — it was the most popular option in a 7,840-response consultation. They approved the move anyway. Lancashire's cross-party health scrutiny committee has since asked the Health Secretary to call the decision in. That request is still sitting unanswered.
What we're asking for
We're not asking anyone to work miracles. We're asking the Health Secretary to do the one thing already on the table: call in this decision before a single spade goes in the ground, and make NHS chiefs show their working on what moving this A&E does to 999 crews and GP surgeries already running hot. We love the doctors, nurses and paramedics doing their best in this system. Our fight is with the people who ignored 7,840 of us and are hoping nobody joins the dots.
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