More than one in four women do not have a midwife or doctor giving them one-to-one care when they go into labour, a survey to be published this week reveals.

The disclosure that many couples have to make do with intermittent support will increase pressure on the government to recruit and train thousands more staff for maternity wards.

The survey by the National Childbirth Trust, due to be released on Thursday, shows that 27 per cent of women did not have continuous care during the birth of a child. The rest did, from a midwife, a student midwife, a healthcare assistant or a doctor.

However, Health Minister Liam Byrne signalled today that the government intends to offer women more choice over the kind of birth they have. He also said having the same midwife before and after the birth was extremely important.

In an interview as part of The Observer' s Better Birth campaign, Byrne said couples needed a lot of support after a birth if they were not to feel isolated. 'It is continuity of care which will make the difference,' he said. 'You want to talk to the person you spoke to before the birth, after the birth.'

Byrne, 33, and his wife Sarah have three children.'Our experience of those three births was very different,' he said. 'Our middle boy, John, was born in a midwife-led unit in Watford in a birthing pool. It was a magical experience.

'We had the other two in [an operating] theatre, because close monitoring was needed. I can see that the quality of care in birth makes a huge difference to how you feel afterwards.'

Women most likely to receive one-to-one care the whole time either have their baby at home or at a midwife-led birth centre. Women from ethnic minorities are significantly less likely to have received continuous support from a midwife during labour.

Continuous support is said to make women feel calmer and reduces the need for pain-relieving drugs. A review by British researchers two years ago, which involved more than 13,000 women, found that those who received continuous support also had less chance of a delivery using forceps or ventouse.

The NCT survey - carried out between January and April - was based on questionnaires filled in by 676 women across the UK who had recently given birth. Mary Newburn, the trust's head of policy, said: 'One-to-one care during labour is really important, and the level of care women receive will have a significant influence on the kind of birth they have.

'These figures suggest that there are simply not enough staff, whether midwives or healthcare assistants, to be with women right through the birth of their child. The government really needs to consider how it's going to address the situation.'

In his interview Byrne said the government intends to recruit more maternity support workers - and possibly even independent midwives- to help alleviate the pressure on the wards.

He gave his backing to an Observer objective: to look at using independent midwives to offer alternative models of care within the NHS. A meeting has been fixed with their representatives to discuss how this might work.

Byrne sees maternity support workers as people who can be attached to midwifery units, or work in children's centres, to provide much of the support for new mothers and take the burden off the other professionals. Good follow-up care was crucial in help ing to prevent women from suffering postnatal depression, he said.

He pointed out that there has been a big improvement in the safety of births in the past decade, although there were still unacceptable variations in mortality rates according to people's income level. 'The issue now is how you offer more choice and control, without compromising that safety. We want to deliver that to every family, regardless of ethnicity or income. We have to ensure that a [high] quality of service is available more widely.'

In its general election manifesto in May, Labour promised that by 2009 women would be cared for by a named midwife throughout a pregnancy and receive continuous care throughout the delivery.

Byrne is adamant that there is enough money available to pay for the improvements. He said: 'The primary care trusts are getting an increase of between 24 per cent and 30 per cent over the next three years. It's an enormous amount for local commissioning of services.'

However, some wonder how the target will be achieved, even in four years. Maggie Elliott, president of the Royal College of Midwives, recently told The Observer more had to be done to attract women back into the profession.

The college says 10,000 more midwives are needed, but the government claims that 2,270 have been recruited since 2001. The college says many of them work part-time, so this figure equates to fewer than 400 full-timers.

'If we had more nurses, then we could offer every woman one-to-one care,' said Elliott. 'We could really look at improving the model of care we have right now.' Another problem is a shortage of university places,' Elliott said. 'There are more people applying than we actually have places for. But 20 per cent of those who do get in drop out because the bursaries for study are means-tested, so thousands of them are hardly getting any money. We shouldn't make it so financially tough to be a midwife.'