The Wards That Need This A&E Most Are the Ones Losing It
18,178 children share one children's A&E in West Lancashire — and the neighbourhoods with the highest rates of emergency admissions are the same ones about to lose their nearest one.
We keep talking about "the children's A&E" like it's an abstract line on a spreadsheet. It isn't. It's 18,178 real children, aged 0 to 14, living across West Lancashire right now — and for some of them, it's already the service they lean on the most.
The number behind the decision
Add up the official population figures for West Lancashire and you get 5,510 children aged 0–4, 5,934 aged 5–9, and 6,734 aged 10–14 — 18,178 children in total, plus thousands more aged 15–19. That's the real "customer base" for the children's A&E that's being moved 8 miles away to Southport.
These aren't evenly spread across the district, and neither is need. Local health data shows some wards already send children to emergency care far more often than the district average. For injuries in children under 15, the highest rates in West Lancashire are in Halsall (143.4 per 10,000), Moorside (125.1), Tanhouse (123.7), Skelmersdale South (122.6) and Scott (117.0) — against a district rate of 97.4. For emergency admissions among under-5s, Skelmersdale South (291.9 per 1,000), Newburgh (289.9), Halsall (234.7), Hesketh-with-Becconsall (230.2) and Scarisbrick (220.8) all sit well above the district figure of 191.1.
Highest need, longest journey
Look at where those wards sit on a map and the injustice comes into focus. Halsall, Hesketh-with-Becconsall, Scarisbrick, Newburgh — these are the outlying, harder-to-reach communities where a trip to Southport instead of Ormskirk adds real minutes onto an already-stressful journey with a frightened child in the back seat. The wards with the most children needing emergency care are, in several cases, the wards furthest from the service that's replacing theirs.
We want to be clear: this is not the fault of the doctors and nurses at Ormskirk, who we trust with our kids every single day. Our fight is with the decision-makers who approved this move on 13 March 2026 after a 13-week public consultation in which keeping the children's A&E at Ormskirk was the most popular option — a consultation NHS bosses had already prejudged, having named Southport their "preferred option" before it even opened.
Lancashire County Council's health scrutiny committee voted unanimously, across party lines, to ask the Health Secretary to call in this decision. West Lancashire MP Ashley Dalton backed a reversal too. That request is still sitting unanswered.
What we're asking for
Every one of those 18,178 children deserves a decision based on where the need actually is — not one made in a boardroom before the public even had its say. We're asking the Health Secretary to formally call in this decision before a single brick is moved. Our kids in Halsall, Skelmersdale, Newburgh and every other corner of West Lancashire are waiting for someone to notice they were never really "consulted" at all.
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