Eleven years ago, the NHS Liverpool Clinical Commissioning Group announced the closure of one of Liverpool’s hospitals. They chose the Women’s. Campaigners were clear from the start: “Save the Liverpool Women’s Hospital. No closure. No privatisation. No cuts. No merger.” Reorganise the funding structures by all means, we said, but not the hospital. Our babies and mothers, our sick women, deserve the very best.
All of Liverpool’s maternity and women’s health provision sits on this one site. It’s a much-loved hospital, providing specialised care and the daily joy of new babies. The drive to close it comes from a clumsy funding structure, not the needs of women and babies – and wards at the new Liverpool Royal are no equivalent.
The latest Ockenden report, reviewing serious maternity cases across England, has put maternity funding, staffing and organisation back in the national spotlight. The danger is that the outrage gets normalised and blows over, unless a major campaign is built through women’s organisations, unions and community groups. Socialists helped build the NHS and we can help rebuild it too. Our campaign, and others, shows it can be done.
Liverpool Women’s Hospital is the largest maternity hospital in England, possibly Europe, and sits just a mile from the Royal Liverpool Hospital. The local integrated care board (ICB) calls it “isolated” – but it’s only isolated in being a separate legal entity. It’s a maternal medicine centre and tertiary hospital taking complex referrals, with a large new neo-natal unit serving babies from well beyond Liverpool. It also provides fertility treatment, genetics advice and a termination of pregnancy service. It’s loved because it’s a women’s place – about 7,000 babies are born here each year, alongside 52,000 gynaecology appointments.
It does lack some services. New build would cost £350-500m; necessary improvements to the Women’s would cost £6m a year – a far more cost-effective use of money. But like all UK maternity care, it’s chronically underfunded, understaffed, and under constant pressure to cut. Nor is it immune to the racism that damages maternity care, though the deaths of two African women did spark a major anti-racism drive. We’re not a fan club for the hospital – we’re trying to defend and improve it.
Women have carried the bulk of the burden of austerity for over a decade and this is part of that pattern – a national service used by women, mostly staffed by women, run largely by men and a patriarchal neoliberal government with little respect for either. Staffing can meet guidelines and still be inadequate. Midwives and obstetricians have tried to make themselves heard nationally, with little success. England now has unemployed newly qualified midwives alongside existing staff run off their feet – and Liverpool Women’s Hospital isn’t immune to any of it.
Under national pressure to cut the number and cost of Liverpool’s hospitals, despite the city’s poor health, the ICB proposes moving the most complex cases to the Royal first, then the whole service. But there’s no room at the Royal. Its staff are amazing, but it’s already too small, with long winter crises, corridor care even in summer, boarding in and worse finances than the Women’s.
The Save Liverpool Women’s Campaign now has 91,000 signatures (on paper and online), runs regular city-centre stalls and has held three large demonstrations. We work with local trade unions, support NHS workers’ picket lines and cooperate across the ICB area to defend the NHS. We attend ICB and trust board meetings, read every board paper and ask the hard questions. We’ve distributed thousands of leaflets, run a blog, put up banners and posters across the city and also published a 41-page rebuttal of the ICB’s Case for Change.
The NHS changed the lives of mothers and babies. We must fight to restore, repair and rebuild it – and its much-needed and valued maternity services.
Click here for more on the Save Liverpool Women’s Campaign.
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