Save Liverpool Women’s Hospital Update

Campaigns Women

The CCG have decided to restrict discussion on the future of the hospital to just one option, not the four explicitly
promised.

The North of England Clinical senate has advised on this single option. The North of England Clinical senate is not a neutral body but one that works within the Government plans for the NHS, which includes privatisation and shrinking services. It is not a neutral body.

  • The move will be massively costly, over £10 million. This at a time the Royal College of Nursing says nursing staff shortages are compromising patient care, staffing is so tight that patients can be left to die alone. The removal of bursaries is hitting recruitment.
  • Services across the country are being restricted.
  • The actual problems at the Liverpool Women’s Hospital cannot wait the 5 years or so a new building might take, The neonatal unit needs to expand and update, the blood services (not just at LWH) and imaging need to be improved, now.
  • Maternity care facilities are being cut across the country and the pernicious Maternity Review is being
    implemented. This area is a maternity vanguard area. They are on record as saying they want women to give
    birth at home, not in a hospital. See our facebook for the video
  • The US model of care to which the NHS moving, does not cater well for maternity. Texas has the highest
    maternal mortality rates in the developed world
  • The NHS in the north of England (covered by the NHS Senate,that penned,the report) also said,
    Women in labour can safely travel four hours without risk to their baby.
  • Many hospitals are on more than one site, including both the Liverpool Royal and Arrowe Park, yet it is said to be too dangerous for the Liverpool Women’s to be a mile away from an acute hospital? One mile away is dangerous, we are told, yet women giving birth at home could be many miles away.
  • At Free Standing midwife units, (unlike the alongside midwife led unit at our hospital) one in four women need to be transferred to hospital. On that basis, this must also be dangerous. Yet four hours travel in labour is safe?
  • Most of the cost problems in Liverpool Women’s hospital come from the internal structures and systems of
    the internal market in the NHS.
  • The Maternity Vanguard are intent on setting up a “pop up” maternity unit to “explore women’s choices”. No mention of the choices tens of thousands of women have indicated in our petition. Choosing our choices
    for us it seems.
  • The NHS needs to be fully funded with more beds doctors and nurses and midwives and related professions.
  • The STPs and accountable care organisations are a risk to the whole NHS, free at the point of need,  publicly provided and a universal service. Merseyside and Cheshire STP is one of the largest.
  • PFI hospital building has wasted billions of pounds of taxpayer money and not one is fire safe. The private companies get the fees and profits and guess who pays to make these brand new hospitals fire safe?
  • Staff still work under the pay cap and many cannot make ends meet. What does Hunt the health secretary offer? An app to let you do more shifts.
  • Not one mention of the major problems of traffic pollution at the proposed site which especially damages babies in the womb and new borns. The site proposed will include the Cancer centre and a life sciences commercial building, bringing in still more traffic. Can we have some joined up thinking please?

How you can be involved?

Invite our campaign to meet a group of your friends or your organisation. Ask us to your union meeting. Come to a campaign meeting. Leaflet your street.

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