A public consultation took place between 26 June and 15 September 2017 on proposals for a single orthopaedics service for Liverpool’s hospitals.

Under these proposals, orthopaedics specialists at Aintree University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust and the Royal Liverpool & Broadgreen University Hospitals NHS Trust would join together to become a single team, working across all three hospital sites.

This would involve separating most planned and unplanned orthopaedics care onto separate hospital sites, which would mean some operations taking place in a different place to where they do currently.

Under the proposed changes, most planned procedures such as hip and knee replacements, would take place at Broadgreen, whilst most unplanned procedures would take place at Aintree, which is already the Major Trauma Centre for Cheshire and Merseyside.

Local orthopaedic doctors believe that this would improve patient care, giving all patients better access to the right doctors for their specific need, and helping meet higher clinical standards.

The orthopaedics proposal is part of a wider Healthy Liverpool vision for transforming hospital services in the city, which could see other hospital services join together as a single, city wide service in the future too – orthopaedics is the first to be put forward in a public consultation.

It also supports work already taking place between Aintree University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust and the Royal Liverpool & Broadgreen University Hospitals NHS Trust exploring how they might become a single organisation in the future.

To enable the proposal to take place, some ear, nose and throat (ENT) services would also need to be moved from Broadgreen to Aintree, and some urology and general surgery services would also need to move from Broadgreen to the Royal Liverpool site.

The consultation was led by NHS Liverpool Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG), working with CCGs in neighbouring Knowsley and Sefton, Aintree University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust and the Royal Liverpool and Broadgreen University Hospitals NHS Trust.

During the consultation NHS Liverpool CCG visited a number of different groups and forums locally to talk about these proposals and gather people’s views. You can read an accompanying information booklet for more details about the proposals.

What you told us

The consultation feedback has been collated and will be used to help inform the final decisions about the future of these services.

You can read a summary of the feedback and the key themes from the consultation process.

Next steps

The outcomes of the consultation process are currently being considered and further updates will be shared here and on NHS Liverpool CCG’s website in the coming months.

Visit the ‘How we use your views’ section for examples of where your feedback has informed our work, plans and strategies.