• A new, dedicated space would be created in the Royal Liverpool Hospital for gynaecology operations and high-risk births and neonatal support, designed to provide women and families with a safe and positive experience of care.

• A six-bed enhanced care unit would also be developed at Liverpool Women’s Hospital to care for very unwell women that don’t meet the requirements for an emergency transfer to intensive care at the Royal Liverpool.

• Extra investment into additional specialist staff time to provide more support to patients at Liverpool Women’s e.g. colorectal, urology, cardiology and critical care specialists.

• Providing more gynaecology and maternity support to emergency teams at Aintree and the Royal Liverpool to help care for women presenting at Accident & Emergency (A&E).

• More allied health professionals to support women’s health at Liverpool Women’s e.g. dieticians, therapists.

• Expanding the outreach midwifery service to help support pregnant women being treated at other hospitals (due to having other health issues).

• A dedicated ambulance to provide rapid maternity and gynaecology transfers between hospitals, when needed.

• Additional outpatient gynaecology and maternity clinics at Aintree Hospital, improving access to care for women in North Liverpool.

If this proposal goes ahead, it would only improve care for a very small number of women receiving complex or high risk procedures.

Doctors estimate that this number would include around 30 very high-risk deliveries, and between 75 – 100 gynaecology operations which would take place at the Royal Liverpool instead of Liverpool Women’s each year. 

This equates to about 1% of all gynaecology and maternity patients treated in Liverpool.

Under this proposal, only a very small number of women would be treated at the Royal Liverpool Hospital instead of Liverpool Women’s, and their care would be organised in a highly planned and managed way. 

If the proposal went ahead, we would be putting very clear arrangements in place to support patient care, including increasing staff resources and creating a new, dedicated safe space at the Royal Liverpool Hospital site to help accommodate the extra gynaecology and maternity patients.

It’s also important to recognise that the way that services are currently organised already has an impact on staff time, ambulance capacity and hospital space – both at the Royal Liverpool and Liverpool Women’s Hospital.

This proposal is about making existing care safer and more planned for patients, not creating any additional pressure.

Although planning to provide high risk and complex procedures at the Royal Liverpool Hospital will improve care for the most seriously unwell women, we can’t always predict who will need services that aren’t available at Liverpool Women’s Hospital in advance.

It would require significant financial investment to address every challenge, and at the moment we are not able to progress this level of change. 

Doctors, nurses and midwives at Liverpool Women’s and other local hospitals are working hard to manage the clinical risks and keep care safe for patients for now. Some of the main ways that they do this include:

• Senior doctors travelling by ambulance with seriously unwell patients who need to be moved to another hospital.

• Providing bespoke care packages for patients with very complex care needs, with input from specialists based at different hospitals.

• An outreach midwife service has also been established to provide care to patients being treated at other hospitals.

• Teams from Liverpool Women’s and other hospitals working together to share knowledge, training and resources.

If the decision was made to go ahead with this proposal, the NHS would need to spend approximately £2 million to create new treatment spaces at both Liverpool Women’s Hospital and the Royal Liverpool Hospital.

The NHS would also commit to investing around £5.5 million extra each year into maternity and gynaecology services to cover the extra investment in staffing and other resources required to make these changes happen.

All of this money would be found from existing NHS budgets.

No, this process is not about saving money, and it does not involve the cutting of any services. It is about reducing clinical risks, improving the gynaecology and maternity services that we have already, and protecting them for the future.

No, there are no plans to close Liverpool Women's Hospital on Crown Street. The hospital site is an important NHS asset, and we want to reassure our communities that whatever proposals might go ahead to improve the safety of gynaecology and maternity services in the future, we are committed to maintaining that site as an NHS hospital facility.

This commitment is also clearly reflected in the current proposals being put forwards, which would see the NHS continuing to develop and invest in additional services on the Crown Street site, as well moving some very complex care procedures across to the Royal Liverpool.

We know that this proposal to move high risk and complex care would not solve all of the problems that come from having gynaecology and maternity in a separate hospital to other services.

The NHS is still committed to finding a long-term solution that will improve quality, safety and sustainability of gynaecology and maternity services for everyone who uses them in Liverpool.

No longer term options have been agreed or ruled out just yet, and discussions about the best way to address the remaining challenges will continue, as we consider moving forwards with this smaller proposal.

The challenges facing hospital gynaecology and maternity services aren’t to do with the hospital building. They’re about the way that medicine, and the health needs of our population, have changed over the last 30 years.

Key changes that have taken place during this time include:

• More people with serious health conditions are able to have children which increases the complexity of care.
• More people are having babies at a later age, which is linked to increased risks.
• People are living longer, which means that demand for gynaecological services among older women is increasing.
• Advances in cancer treatment mean that more women are receiving complex gynaecological surgery.

Yes, gynaecology and maternity services in Liverpool are arranged in a different way to elsewhere in country. All other specialist centres for maternity care in England are located alongside acute and emergency hospital services.

The way that hospital gynaecology and maternity services are currently organised in Liverpool is actually disadvantaging women’s health, when compared to: 

• those using services at other hospitals in Liverpool
• women using gynaecology and maternity services in other parts of the country

Without a permanent solution being found, patients in Liverpool will be left with poorer quality care than gynaecology and maternity patients receive in other parts of the country.

It is not possible for the NHS to deliver care in this way. This is because there are simply not enough specialist doctors, nurses and support teams available to be able to duplicate all types of care at every hospital site.