Some time ago, I had to make the journey every local parent dreads. My young son was experiencing a severe medical episode in the middle of the night, and I had to get him to Alder Hey. It was a nightmare situation and a nightmare journey. Thankfully, we had a happy conclusion. Others who have to make that trip might not be so lucky.
It’s not surprising, then, that as a Southport father writing for a Southport news organisation, I’m broadly supportive of today’s decision to bring paediatric A&E back to Southport Hospital. A full, 24-hour children’s emergency department on our doorstep is genuinely excellent news. It should never have been taken away in the first place.
And yet, it’s difficult to silence that small, nagging feeling in the back of my mind.
The polite way of assessing Southport Hospital would perhaps be to say: it’s certainly had its challenges. Service splits, mergers, a chief executive sacked for gross misconduct. We all know what the corridors are like. It does feel like the place has been stuck in an administrative limbo for decades. None of this is a reflection of the staff, who I’ve always found to be hard-working, dedicated and attentive while operating in a challenging environment. But it’s our hospital. Even if it isn’t the best hospital, it’s ours. And the fight to protect its services is perfectly understandable.
On that front, it’s genuinely good news that a frontline paediatric A&E will return. For 23 years, Southport families have been making the journey to Ormskirk with sick children, often without a car, often in the middle of the night. That shouldn’t have to happen in a town of this size. Today’s decision puts that right.
But I have a tremendous amount of sympathy for the residents of West Lancashire, who are very justifiably angry at the pending loss of their service in Ormskirk.
The Shaping Care Together programme made great effort in its documents and presentations to explain that Southport and Ormskirk are the only general admission hospitals in the country that house children’s and adult A&E services on different sites. It is perhaps beyond the scope of the programme to fully evaluate the simplest question: why?
Why are we, quite literally, the only geographic area in the entire country that has spent 23 years being forced into an “us versus them” town boundary battle over health services? Why did it get to this point? Why were two communities pitted against each other for a generation, fighting over a resource that most other areas of comparable size simply have?
Pretty PowerPoint presentations might save the jobs of the administrators. They certainly don’t make the decisions any more palatable for ordinary people. A parent in Skelmersdale doesn’t care about hurdle criteria or evaluation frameworks. They care about how they’re going to get their child to hospital at 2am with no car and no bus.
The package of measures offered to West Lancashire is tellingly described as “mitigations” – a word that, by definition, means to make something less severe or less painful. The choice of terminology is, in effect, an acknowledgement that communities in Ormskirk and Skelmersdale are being asked to accept a worse outcome, and that the best the programme can offer is to soften the blow.
The shuttle buses that residents asked for? They’ll be “considered.” The upgrade of Skelmersdale’s walk-in centre that the scrutiny committee recommended? It’s not in the business case. The £178,000 targeted GP investment? It wouldn’t cover the salary of two full-time doctors.
Today’s decision is the right one for Southport. But it didn’t have to come at the expense of Ormskirk. Twenty-three years of institutional failure created an impossible choice between two towns and their surrounding areas.