From 1 April 2026, we are moving from five Hospital Management Boards (HMB) to three new HMB structures:

  • Aintree Hospital Management Board
  • Royal Liverpool and Liverpool Women’s Hospital Management Board
  • Liverpool Heart and Chest Hospital / Broadgreen / Diagnostic and Treatment Centre Hospital Management Board.

The sites will be run by Hospital Leadership Teams, with two newly formed HLTs for the Royal and Liverpool Women’s and LHCH/BGH/DTC and new site structures.

Photo showing the members of the Royal and Liverpool Women's HMB

Photo showing diagram of RLH LWH site structure

 

Leanne Cooper appointed Executive Managing Director of Royal Liverpool and Liverpool Women's HMB

We are pleased to share that Leanne Cooper has been appointed as the new Executive Managing Director for both the Royal Liverpool University Hospital and Liverpool Women’s University Hospital. She will start in June 2026. Until then, Joanne Eccles, Director of Operations, will remain Interim Executive Managing Director.

Leanne brings over 15 years of senior NHS leadership experience and joins us from Airedale NHS Foundation Trust, where she has spent the last three years as Chief Operating Officer. Before that, she served as Deputy COO at Morecambe Bay, giving her strong experience across large, complex hospital environments.

She has a strong track record of delivering significant improvements in quality, performance, productivity, and financial sustainability across acute, community, system‑wide services, and women's and children's services. Her leadership has driven major programmes in urgent and emergency care, elective recovery, digital transformation - including executive responsibility for Electronic Patient Record deployment - and large‑scale estates and safety programmes such as the RAAC mitigation programme and maternity service estate improvements. Read more

 

Photo showing members of the BGH LHCH and DTC HMB.

Diagram of the LHCH BGH and DTC site structure

 

Why are we doing this?

  • Size and scale: Each HMB will oversee hospitals of a similar size, with comparable staff numbers and budgets
  • Standardised and consistent: Management arrangements will be standardised with consistent role banding and a clear process for any exceptions
  • Corporate services: This clarity allows Corporate Service to be better aligned to support the organisation and the new HMBs. For example, services will be able to apply a consistent approach to business partner support based on staffing levels at each hospital.

How will this affect services?

It’s important to note that these changes only relate to management arrangements:

  • There will be no changes to how services are delivered
  • How patients access care, where services are located, and hospital names will remain the same
  • Where more than one hospital sits under an HMB, each site will continue to operate as it does now and maintain its identity.