So, let me start by wishing you and those you love a very happy Christmas!

I guess we all know that Christmas can be a time of highs and lows. I am a social worker in a mental health crisis team, and Christmas can be a particularly difficult time for people that we work with. Not only can it be a highly emotional time, but it can be difficult money-wise: to get things on the table and make sure there are presents for everyone.

And it will be a strange time for my own family this year. We lost my mum in the middle of October, and welcomed our daughter, our first child, in the middle of November. 2007 has been a whirlwind for us, with lots of changes. And I have to say that I will be glad when the New Year comes…

On the day that this column goes up on the Observer website, there will be 24 hours to save local maternity services. On 20 December, our local PCTs decide whether or not to preserve a maternity unit both at Eastbourne and Hastings.

The irony has not been lost on me that at a time of year when traditionally many of us are thinking nativity, we have our own peculiar maternity story in East Sussex.

It is disgraceful that things have come to this. We are the fourth largest economy in the world, and yet we can't seem to provide a high quality essential service to each of our country's towns. NHS manager-bureaucrats and even, dare I say it, our own MP, will try to blind you with science if you ask why it is that, with more money than ever going into the Health Service, we are faced with outcomes like this.

The Liberal Democrat Party has been the only political party that has been united (across the county) in its support for the retention of a consultant-led maternity unit in both Eastbourne and Hastings. We have been fighting tooth and nail alongside Margaret Williams of Hands off the Conquest, and her colleagues over at Save the DGH. This column is my last opportunity to try to affect the final decision of the relevant management boards.

So I say to them - please let your Christmas present to local people be the fact that you have really listened, and that finally, you will back Option 5.