If it was an attempt to distance an embattled minister from a crisis, it backfired.

Health Minister Jillian Skinner's absence on Saturday as the report was released into how two babies were poisoned by gas – one fatally – at Bankstown-Lidcombe hospital, when they should have received life-saving oxygen, only highlighted that the Liberal Party veteran is hanging onto her political career by a thread.

The Westminster tradition of ministerial responsibility demands that a minister takes ultimate responsibility for what her department does.

It is a minister's job to take the public heat, not a bureaucrat's. Yet Mrs Skinner made the decision that the NSW chief health officer, Kerry Chant, was to front the cameras alone on Saturday because it was "her report".