Lucky enough to have five children, health visitors played a significant role in mine and my wife's lives as our family grew.

Upon leaving hospital, new parents would be secure in the knowledge that an experienced and caring professional would be regularly visiting to offer the advice and support that they wanted.

They cover areas such as early development, nutrition and even the detection and treatment of post natal depression – something that can affect women irrespective of their experience or family support.

Health visitors should be there to support all parents but they often offer the most help to vulnerable families who may not know how else to access the advice they need.

That's why it's such a tragedy that in recent years the role of the health visitor has been allowed to decline. In the last three years there has been a ten per cent decrease in the number of trained health visitors and over the next five years a further 30 per cent are eligible for retirement.

This means that caseloads are ever-rising and health visitors are not always able to spend the time they want with each family, building up that trusted relationship.

That's why Conservatives have pledged to double the number of trained health visitors. We believe they should be able to offer a really enhanced service including two home visits during the later weeks of pregnancy, six hours home support in the first two weeks and guaranteed visits each year up to the age of five.

The aim is to increase the current amount of time that health visitors spend with each child – on average a paltry four hours and six minutes to a guaranteed 23 hours.

Not only will this enhanced service be of very real benefit to individual families but the subsequent improvement in children's development, nutrition and performance at school will be of obvious benefit to wider society.

I'd be interested in learning about readers' more recent experiences of health visiting.

Did you receive the help and support that you wanted and how do you think the service can be improved for new parents and also the people that undertake this challenging role?

Are you a health visitor? How has your role changed over recent years and how would you like to see things improve?