Their Own Numbers Say The System Isn't Coping
NHS England's own performance data shows the hospitals due to take our children's A&E are already missing the targets NHS England set for itself.
Two hours. That's roughly the point at which the risk of dying within a month of an A&E visit starts climbing — the longer someone waits, the higher that risk climbs, whatever they came in with. NHS England's own data shows the wider system our kids would be pushed into is already struggling to keep waits that short. That's the system they want to move our children's A&E into.
The system is already missing its own targets
In the last quarter of 2025/26, major A&E departments (the "type 1" units that see the most serious cases, like the one at Southport) admitted, transferred or discharged only 60% of patients within four hours — out of 6.9 million attendances nationally. NHS England's own interim objective was 82% by March 2026. It missed that too: in May 2026, just 76% of all A&E attendances (across every type of unit) were seen within four hours.
This isn't a one-off bad month. It's the system NHS Lancashire & South Cumbria and NHS Cheshire & Merseyside decided was ready to absorb our children's emergency care, on top of what it already handles.
Minutes cost lives, and the data proves it
We keep saying minutes matter. NHS data backs that up at a national level too. Patients who spent 12 hours in A&E had 2.1 times higher odds of dying within 30 days of discharge than patients who spent just 2 hours there — even after accounting for how ill they were to begin with. The median time a patient spends in A&E nationally was 2 hours 59 minutes in March 2026. Long waits aren't just uncomfortable. They're dangerous, and the evidence says so.
Trolley waits are rising, not falling
For patients who need to be admitted, the wait doesn't end when a doctor decides they need a bed. In May 2026, 50,212 patients — 9% of all emergency admissions that month — waited more than 12 hours between the decision to admit them and actually reaching a ward. That's the reality of the wider hospital network our children's A&E is being moved into: a system already missing its own targets, with waits that carry real, measured risk.
Nobody chose this pressure. It isn't the fault of the doctors and nurses working these shifts — we love the staff at Ormskirk and we know their colleagues across the system are doing their best under the same strain. Our fight is with the people who signed off a plan to add more demand to a system that's already missing the numbers it set for itself, without explaining how that makes our kids safer.
What we're asking for: the Health Secretary must formally call in the decision to move Ormskirk's children's A&E to Southport before any work begins — and look properly at whether a system this stretched should be taking on more.
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