News from the doorstep - Don't Move our Mums!

The most striking message from the doorstep while I have been canvassing in Whitehaven has been the extent of concern about maternity services at West Cumberland hospital.

I mentioned a couple of days ago that a one lady living in the Bransty area of Whitehaven said to myself and my colleage Alex Carroll, that if West Cumberland Hospital had not been here at the time of more than one of her pregnancies, she and her children would have died.

This evening, another lady made quite independently to us an almost identical comment along the lines of

"If our hospital had not been here a few years ago when my baby was born neither I nor he would be here today."

It's not just a coincidence. When you stop to consider it, the idea of taking a thousand pregnant women a year forty to sixty miles along some of the worst trunk roads in Britain to give birth in Carlisle does not bear thinking about.