Move the A&E, and the Overflow Lands on Your GP
Downgrade the children's A&E and the demand doesn't vanish — it queues at reception, on hold to 111, and in the back of an ambulance.
We love the doctors and nurses at Ormskirk. Our fight isn't with them — it's with the people who decided our kids' A&E should move 8 miles away and never asked what happens to everyone left behind.
Because here's what nobody on that committee seems to have modelled: when a family can't get their child to an A&E fast enough, or won't make an 8-mile round trip for something that might not need it, they don't just stay home. They ring the GP. They ring 111. Sometimes they ring 999. The demand doesn't disappear when you move a department. It just turns up somewhere else in a system that's already full.
The GP surgery is already stretched
GP teams in England delivered 1.5 million appointments every single working day over the past year — the highest number on record, according to NHS England's own figures published in March 2026. There are now 63.5 million patients registered with a GP in England, up nearly 13% (6.6 million people) since 2015. Over the same period, 1,470 independent GP practices have closed or merged, leaving just 6,153 covering all of them. More patients, fewer surgeries. That's the system we're about to ask to absorb the families who used to walk into Ormskirk.
111 and 999 are the backstop — and they're already under strain
NHS 111 answered 360,286 calls in the last week of January 2026 alone — almost 5,000 more than the same week a year earlier, part of a steady year-on-year climb in call volumes. And when 111 sends an ambulance, the clock is already tight: nationally, category 2 responses averaged 32 minutes 43 seconds, missing the 30-minute recovery target set for 2025/26. North West Ambulance Service — the crews who'll be covering us — are set a standard of an 18-minute average for category 2 calls, with 9 in 10 arriving inside 40 minutes. Every extra mile between a sick child and care makes that target harder to hit, not easier.
Ormskirk's A&E already absorbs this pressure locally
That's precisely why a local children's A&E matters: it's the release valve that stops a feverish toddler at 9pm becoming a 111 call, a 999 call, or a GP appointment squeezed in the next morning because nobody could get seen the night before. Move it to Southport and you don't remove that pressure — you just relocate it onto a GP system already running record numbers, and an ambulance service already fighting to hit its own clock.
What we're asking for: the Health Secretary must call in this decision, as Lancashire County Council's scrutiny committee and our MP have both asked, unanswered, since March. Before a single brick moves, someone in government needs to explain where the overflow goes when our children's A&E does.
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