AND once again the vultures appear to be circling over the accident and emergency department at Warrington Hospital.

No less an organ than the Health Service Journal has identified the Lovely Lane site and Southport Hospital among the ‘one in six’ casualty units which may be downgraded under the umpteenth reconfiguration of the NHS.

So where does this leave Warrington and North Cheshire, with probably the highest per capita motorway network and, especially around Runcorn and Widnes, the largest concentration of heavy-duty chemical plants?

Your correspondent has sat through countless hospital board meetings across the north west (and inquests, sorry to say), where medics have hammered home the importance of the ‘golden hour’ after a major trauma incident.

Just how much of that vital 60 minutes, with all possible respect to our highly-trained paramedics, would you want your nearest and dearest to spend in a gridlock on the M6, M62 or M56, heading to Leighton, The Countess of Chester or a Liverpool hospital?

I’m eagerly awaiting the parade of medical experts who will no doubt be wheeled out to explain how concentrating expertise in single places works wonders for innovation and treatment.

The sort who revel in titles like ‘programme director’, and can easily bat away questions about why a G8 nation’s health service is quite so broke.

Before the NHS super-bureaucrats out there sharpen their iPads, the dark spectre of Cheshire and Merseyside’s sustainability and transformation plan (STP) must be acknowledged.

If we don’t carve off £908 million by 2021 from the health and social care budget – by simple measures like not turning up to surgeries or hospitals quite so much, not expecting prescriptions to be proffered by GPs or district nurses, spending on unfashionable diseases being phased out – we’re apparently all doomed.

(Quite why the NHS and social care had to be lumped together into one mega-crisis seems masochistic, but then that’s just me perhaps.) Whatever gumbo is served up from this unholy cauldron, sacrifices in A&E provisions are seemingly unavoidable, with more than one location liable to lose out.

Two out of the three models for urgent care, drawn up as part of the STP, suggest only three trusts in Cheshire and Merseyside having a 24-hour casualty department.

The third option sees a single A&E for 2.57 million people, with two reduced-hours sites and patients being ‘filtered’ to appropriate hospitals.

It’s enough to make Podium wish it had plumped for a calling with private health care. Or made decent whisky, roasted peanuts and blue cheeses more unappealing.

Is it too late to hunt down Michael Gove and Boris Johnson, chain them up their ankles, and demand where that £350 million per week has gone?

  •  The return of the RL season can’t come quickly enough for Podium, especially with Jurgen Klopp’s early promise at Liverpool settling into the familiar strain of frustration in the Premier League.

One ex-Wire associate had more reasons than most to relish February’s arrival, as former prop Rob Parker made his small-screen acting debut in the BBC serial Taboo last Saturday.

Parker, who also played for Leigh Centurions and Salford Red Devils in a demanding career, has forged an unlikely bond with Taboo’s star, Tom Hardy.

He’s also signed up as general manager for Swinton Lions, Wire’s former dual registration partners, this season and it’s good to see an old Wilderspool warrior making a good fist of things after hanging his boots up.