Women’s hospital services in Liverpool

The NHS is looking at hospital gynaecology and maternity services in Liverpool.

Most of these services happen at Liverpool Women’s Hospital, on Crown Street in Toxteth, which means they are separate from other hospital services, and this can sometimes create issues and delays with care.

The NHS is committed to finding a long-term solution that will improve the quality and safety of hospital gynaecology and maternity services, giving patients the best experience, wherever they are being treated.

If you would like to be kept informed with how this programme progresses, you can join the Virtual Reference Group to receive email updates when new information is made available.

Progress during 2025

In March 2025, the Women’s Services Committee received a report into the autumn 2024 public engagement and approved an options process for the programme. The Board of NHS Cheshire and Merseyside also received the public engagement report, which you can read here.

An options process took place during spring/summer 2025. This involved local doctors, nurses and midwives, those with lived experience of gynaecology and maternity services (members of the programme’s Lived Experience Panel), and other partners, coming together in workshops to develop potential options for how services could look in the future.

Coming up

To support options development, work to understand what each potential option would mean for estates (buildings), finance and workforce (staffing) has been taking place. This has been a complex process, and the level of detail required has meant that it has taken slightly longer to finish than had originally been planned. This means that the Women’s Services Committee will now consider the outputs of the work on potential options in November 2025 rather than October 2025. Following this, the Board of NHS Cheshire and Merseyside will discuss the potential options, and next steps, at a private meeting, which will also take place in November 2025.

The intention is that following the Board meeting, from December 2025 onwards, discussions will be held with partners, including local NHS trust boards and local authorities, about how the programme moves forward. At this point, if required, planning would also begin for an external review by clinicians from a different part of the country.

It is therefore likely that we will publish a further update about the programme during the first half of 2026. We know that many members of the public, NHS staff and wider stakeholders have a strong interest in women’s hospital services in Liverpool, and are keen to understand what will happen next. The complexity of the issues we are looking at, together with the ongoing financial challenges affecting the NHS, and planned structural changes to NHS organisations, have impacted our ability to progress this programme of work at the pace which had been intended.

These factors also mean that we will need to take stock before we can decide how to proceed. However, it’s important to stress that no final decisions about what services might look like in the future have been made at this point, and if the decision was made to produce a business case containing potential options, we would then continue with the NHS England assurance process, external clinical review, and planning the public and stakeholder involvement required.

For more information about the programme, visit www.gynaeandmaternityliverpool.nhs.uk.

Past briefings

Women’s Services Committee Chair Professor Hilary Garrett CBE provides updates after each meeting, which can be found below, alongside updates from the previous Chair, Raj Jain. Here you will also find any updates from James Sumner, Chair of the Women’s Hospital Services in Liverpool Programme Board.