Why must women be custodians of Christmas?

Imagine a place where 64,000 new mothers and newborns are harmed by staff blunders in the one location they ought to be safest: hospital. Now, visualise a country where 800 of those exhausted women and helpless babies die or suffer brain damage over the same two-year period. Lives lost, families devastated.

Welcome to the National Health Service, where all too often the passage from cradle to grave is shockingly, criminally swift.

I’m not sure what, exactly, Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt has been doing since he took the job – apart from picking fights with just about every professional body going – but it sure as hell hasn’t been presiding over success.

I could mention any number of unfit-for-purpose services, but let’s stick with the carnage on maternity wards. Hunt talks an endless game about efficiency savings, but the squeeze on healthcare just gets worse. I get the distinct impression he doesn’t lie awake at night reproaching himself for the fact one in five births is now hit by errors.

According to the Royal College of Midwives, the NHS is short of 3,500 midwives, and the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists has estimated that nine in 10 maternity units are short of specialist doctors.

I’ve had two unspeakably awful births. After my first, I had a meeting with the apologetic head of the maternity service. I was assured lessons would be learnt, I was invited to cast my eye over a new leaflet they would be drawing up, and I left never to hear from the hospital again.

On the second occasion, I sent a letter but didn’t have the emotional energy to follow it up. A nurse friend admitted nobody cares unless you threaten to sue. The yawning chasm between best and worst practice must be closed, and we – the public, the patients – must be told the truth about how much it will cost to put our beloved institution back on its feet again, or whether that’s even possible.

It looks very much to me as though Jeremy Hunt is not the man for the job.