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Anxiety levels over the state of maternity care in Britain reached new levels over the weekend. All major newspapers chose to give significant coverage to the story, seeming to indicate that with the Brown-Cameron clash currently intensifying and reaching new levels of credibility as a contest, the staff shortages and medical negligence in the NHS are forming as two key electoral issues.
Indeed, staff shortages are being blamed for fatal deficiencies in Britain's current maternity services. In the last three years alone, £665m has been paid out for both birth injuries and fatal births.
The issue is generating a great deal of emotion. Internet blogs and forums suggest a public very sensitive to the issues. One common theme among bloggers was the idea that it makes no sense to "save" on hospital spending if shortages then just lead to medical negligence claims.
One leading voice for reform, Prof Sabarataran Arulkumaran of the Royal College of Gynaecologists, has published a document outlining what the authors of the study believe to be the solution to the problems currently wracking birthing services in Britain's NHS hospitals.
"We hope this document will be a blueprint for the organisation of maternity services, whether it is home births, maternity centre births or whatever." He said.
Central to the study's vision are plans for one-to-one patient to midwife care, with continuity and familiarity of care being the underlining ethos.
It is estimated that, against the background of a rising birth rate, a further 5,000 midwives are needed to begin coping with a one-to-one philosophy.
This change is just one in many needed by UK public health services, however, it will be interesting to see how the two major parties will approach the issue.
In many ways, public services represent the eternal catch-22 to electioneering political parties; every man and his dog wants to see improvements in service but also abhors the notion of any increased or new taxes.
With the Tories having already announced plans to raise the threshold on inheritance tax, it will be interesting to see how they posture any prospective funding methods for public spending.
A reminder, if ever we needed one, of just how much there is to do to combat the conditions that make medical negligence a reality in this country, recently came in the form of a warning from the NHS Litigation Authority, the body responsible for medical negligence compensation in the UK, who estimate that they owe £9.2 billion in clinical negligence damages.
Although, because of inflation and the high number of pending claims included in this forecast, there is a great deal of difficulty in establishing an accurate figure, it is the best one we have and certainly makes startling reading.
£9.2 billion is more than the Gross Domestic Product of many of the world's nations. And we're not just talking tiny islands here. The medical negligence compensation bill in the UK is expected to be more than the total value of all goods and services sold in countries as diverse as Paraguay, Jamaica and Macedonia. These are not small countries, why, two of them even possess football teams who've managed, in recent years, to draw with England.
As the world's fifth largest economy, the United Kingdom certainly has it within its power to tackle the NHS head-on. Although, in the first early electoral blows, all we can really be certain of is that it's going to take a brave government that finds an intelligent way to bolster flailing hospital services.
In many ways it is ironic that hospital services are suffering as a result of shortages only to find that, as a result of these economical adjustments, they themselves are further crippled by the cost of medical negligence compensation. Surely the philosophy of any good health system should focus on prevention and not cure. At the moment there is too much apologising.
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