Save Liverpool Women’s Hospital campaign set to voice its opposition to plans to move maternity services away from Crown Street site
The future of Liverpool Women’s Hospital will be the subject of a crucial and potentially tense meeting this week. Last week, the NHS set out its case for change that could see maternity and gynaecological services moved away from the city’s much-loved Crown Street institution.
Health bosses in the region have set out a major case for change, which could result in the biggest shake-up in how maternity services are delivered in this city and this region in decades. Ultimately, they believe the safest option will be to eventually move these services away from Crown Street to be co-located with one of Liverpool’s larger, acute hospital sites.
The Women’s holds an important place in the hearts of many in this part of the world and health leaders know that their proposals will be met with plenty of opposition – as has always been the case when previous calls for change have been announced.
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The Liverpool Women’s Hospital only opened in its current Toxteth home in 1995 but has been the subject of a number of proposals for its closure or relocation – as well as the subject of plenty of campaigns against any such moves. Since 2015, Liverpool Women’s Hospital NHS Foundation Trust has argued that patient safety would be improved by relocating the service close to a major acute hospital where patients can be quickly transferred in emergencies.
In 2016 plans were announced to move Liverpool Women’s Hospital out of its home under a major NHS shake-up. The preferred proposal was for maternity and women’s services to be relocated to a new £100m facility next to the new Royal Liverpool Hospital – which had been intended to open the following year but would go on to be delayed by five years. These proposals sparked large campaigns, protests and rallies by those desperate to keep the Women’s Hospital on its current site and as an individual facility for the women of the city.
The NHS has now launched a new process and while there is an insistence that no concrete proposals are on the table just yet, the direction of travel is clear. The majority of hospital gynaecology and maternity care in the city takes place at Liverpool Women’s Hospital on Crown Street. In its case for change, NHS bosses argue that the biggest challenge facing these services is the fact that they are on a different site to most other acute and emergency hospital care. Liverpool Women’s is the only specialist centre for gynaecology and maternity in the country where this arrangement exists.
The NHS says this current set-up can create problems and delays with care, with seriously ill patients sometimes having to be transferred by ambulance to other local hospitals. Currently around 220 ambulance transfers are made between Liverpool Women’s Hospital and the Royal Liverpool or Aintree hospitals every year, and about half of these ambulance journeys happen in emergency situations.
This case for change will get its first public outing at a meeting of the NHS Cheshire and Merseyside board on Wednesday. It is expected that some of those who have continually campaigned against such changes in the past will make their feelings known once again.
In a new update, posted after the case for change was published, the long-running and powerful Save Liverpool Women’s Hospital campaign laid out its objections.
The statement reads: “Maternity and women’s health need urgent changes, but they don’t include dispersing services and absorbing Liverpool Women’s Hospital into one giant conglomerate. Should we leave structural issues in our health care to “the professionals”? No way. The big managers of the NHS have caused havoc in the last ten years, implementing austerity, privatisation, and the move towards an American model. We have seen more than a decade of damage.”
“We call on the city of Liverpool to defend what we have in the NHS and to fight to improve the rest. No closures, no loss of services, no more mergers, no more outsourcing, no more overworked staff.”
