Jo Brooker still finds it hard to look at seven-year-old girls: the age her firstborn Holly would have been now. Holly, who died four years ago, was profoundly brain damaged at birth, starved of oxygen for a crucial 15 minutes as staff struggled to deliver her at a Surrey hospital.

Jo, now 44, and living with her husband and their two young sons in Somerset, says she was left in the second stage of labour, attended only by junior staff, for longer than she should have been. When she was eventually rushed down to theatre the situation was critical.

The family sued Kingston hospital and won around £70,000 in an out-of-court settlement. “Our case was they had done too little, too late,” said Jo, “that was the tragedy of it, that it was avoidable. If it had been just one of those things, it would have been easier to deal with . . . It was a Friday afternoon and there was no one around.”

After counselling and a spell living in France to try to forget, only now does Jo feel that the family is healing. “We have been through a nightmare and we are only just coming out the other side.”

Last week it was revealed that the NHS faces compensation claims totalling £4.5 billion for alleged mistakes by midwives and doctors during maternity care. Some, tragically, as in Jo’s case, have resulted in babies suffering brain damage, often by being deprived of oxygen during birth.

Horror stories from women put at risk in overstretched maternity wards abound. A recent survey by netmums, a parents support website, of some of their 340,000 members, released to The Sunday Times this week, paints a dispiriting picture of rude and incompetent staff, inadequate monitoring of labour, too few midwives, too little pain relief and too many dirty hospitals (“blood on the floor,” wrote one, “Third-World standard,” complained another).

Last week, in a bid to improve matters and cut unnecessary medical procedures – half of all births now involve some form of instrumental delivery such as forceps or suction, and one in four involve a caesarean section – an overhaul of the system was announced.

The new NHS guidelines – published last Wednesday by the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (Nice), the government’s health watchdog – insist that women must have greater control over where and how they bring their babies into the world. Birthing pools (the safest form of pain relief) are recommended, clinical intervention seen as a last resort, to be offered only when labour is going wrong. Pregnant women should get “supportive one-to-one care”, say the guidelines which add, in a particularly revealing recommendation, that staff should smile at mums-to-be and treat them “with respect”.

Maureen Treadwell, a member of both the Birth Trauma Association, whose website receives 10,000 hits a month, and of the Nice committee that drew up the new rules, said: “Women are having traumatic birth experiences which can then lead to depression and difficulties bonding with their baby.

“I think there is a real problem of communication between midwives and obstetricians, with the former promulgating the natural approach and obstetricians wanting to do emergency interventions . . . They should work as a team,” she said. “The key to the new guidelines is that birth method must be the woman’s choice.”

Dorset mother Ruth Hawkins was among those welcoming the new rules last week. She remembers being treated “like a naughty schoolgirl” and a “piece of plastic” during an “excruciatingly painful” 24-hour labour at a local hospital 10 months ago. The experience, she says, left her severely depressed but also determined never again to give birth with the NHS. “I would take out a loan and go privately if I had another child,” she said.

Elizabeth Jones (not her real name), who lives in northwest England, has tried to turn her trauma to good use by campaigning to get maternity services improved. She had to have an emergency hysterectomy when her third child was born and feels that with both her second and third babies staff failed to understand how much pain and fear she was experiencing during labour. The attitude of some staff, she says, was bullying and impersonal, “that of a mechanic servicing a car”.

Many warn that things will not change unless the new guidelines are also backed by an increase in staff. The Royal College of Midwives (RCM) says that the NHS needs 5,000 more midwives to cope with a service at “breaking point”, while Sabaratnam Arulkumaran, the new president of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, has called for 500 more consultants.

The guidelines are supposed to standardise what everyone agrees is a postcode lottery, with widely varying maternity services across the country. Last week Karlene Davis, the RCM’s general secretary, citing singer Charlotte Church, said that women in Wales had greater choice than those in England. “Why should it be possible for Charlotte Church to give birth at home in water and for women in England not to have that opportunity?” she asked.

In the netmums survey, while some respondents were happy with the way they had been treated, others told horrifying tales.

Catherine from south Essex described enduring an emergency caesarean from staff “far too keen to intervene at any opportunity”. “My experience has put me off hospitals for life,” she wrote.

“I am now too frightened to even consider another baby, unless I can afford private care,” wrote Katy of Peterborough. For too many an event that should be treasured has become one that can never be put right.

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