Even Alder Hey Misses The Target. Now It'll Take Longer To Get There.
The country's best-performing children's hospital still misses the four-hour target for one child in ten — and Ormskirk families are about to be pushed further away from it.
We love the doctors and nurses at Ormskirk. Our fight isn't with them — it's with the people who signed off moving our children's A&E 8 miles away from them, and further from everyone Ormskirk relies on when a child needs more than A&E can give.
Because here's what nobody mentioned in March: the specialist hospitals behind Ormskirk are already under serious strain. Moving further from them, at the exact moment they're struggling, is not a detail. It's the whole problem.
The best in the country still isn't good enough
Alder Hey Children's Hospital is genuinely one of the best-performing children's units in England — ranked second nationally for its four-hour A&E performance in 2024/25, at 89.3%, and second-lowest for patients waiting over 12 hours. That's a hospital doing almost everything right.
And it still misses the four-hour target for roughly one child in ten. Nationally, the picture is worse: NHS England's own figures show just 76% of A&E attendances were seen within four hours in May 2026, against an official objective of 82%. The NHS has been missing its own recovery target for months.
Whiston is already in corridor care
Whiston Hospital — part of the same trust network Ormskirk families are told they can rely on for anything beyond initial treatment — has been the subject of a Healthwatch Halton report describing patients with roughly a 56% chance of being seen within four hours, some waiting eight to nine hours, and corridor care becoming routine enough that the trust had to publicly respond to it.
Ormskirk sits 10–20 minutes closer than Southport to Alder Hey, Whiston and Aintree. That gap exists for a reason: when a child needs more than the local A&E can give, those minutes are the whole point of being close. Move the front door 8 miles further from all three, and you've made the hardest cases — the ones that actually need Alder Hey, or Whiston, or Aintree — slower to reach, at a moment when all three are already stretched thin.
Nobody is saying Southport can't cope on an ordinary day. We're saying the system our kids get handed on to is already missing its own targets — and the decision made in March makes the distance to it longer, not shorter.
What we're asking for
We're not asking for special treatment. We're asking the Health Secretary to do what Lancashire County Council's cross-party scrutiny committee and our own MP have already asked for: call in the decision before £33 million is spent moving a service 7,840 of us said, in a public consultation, we wanted kept exactly where it is.
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