LAST week, The Herald launched its NHS Time for Action campaign, highlighting growing pressures on the health service in Scotland.

With thousands of patients being "boarded" in the wrong department this year because of bed shortages, patients being cared for in cupboards and A&E departments being deemed unsafe, The Herald is calling for a review of hospital and community capacity to determine if the Scottish NHS has enough staff and beds to handle a surge in illness at present and a rising elderly population in future.

Now, following our campaign, the Scottish Labour Party has come forward with another proposal: that a powerful new watchdog be established, merging Health Improvement Scotland (HiS), the NHS's not-quite-a-regulator quality assurance body, and the Care Inspectorate. This new body –Care Improvement Scotland -– would be a full-blooded regulator, independent of the NHS and the single contact point for staff and patients making complaints. It would have sweeping new powers, including to send in "change teams" to turn failing hospitals around.

This is a considered proposal that merits a considered response. There is a strong case to be made for strengthening the regulatory regime. Earlier this year, it was revealed that HiS inspected older people's services at Ninewells but delayed publication of the report following discussions with the chief executive of NHS Tayside, a member of the NHS HiS board; the final published version was watered down compared to the original. That hardly inspires confidence in the current regime. Nor does the recent waiting times scandal, highlighted in Lothian, in which patients were wrongly declared unavailable for treatment simply in order to meet waiting times targets. A nationwide inquiry into the scandal by Audit Scotland was hampered by poor data.

The prospect of a tougher, more independent regulator would likely be welcomed by many of those who have contacted The Herald over recent days, some of whom have so little faith in their local NHS board's complaints procedure that they have not bothered to make any complaint following a distressing experience.

As Scottish Labour's Dr Richard Simpson indicates today in The Herald, the proposal for a new watchdog has partly been driven by a desire to avoid complacency in Scotland following the problems that have convulsed the English NHS.

Over the last year, the NHS in England has been through one of the worst crises in its history. First came the report on hundreds of unnecessary deaths at Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust, then news last week that 11 further English hospital trusts are to be placed in "special measures" for "fundamental breaches of care".

That may not have dampened the ardent loyalty of the public in the institution overall.

What it has done, however, is start to change the debate about the NHS, for the better. This is certainly true in England, where there are signs it has made it easier for politicians and the public to discuss the failings as well as the successes of the health service with greater confidence and honesty, and given the extensive UK-wide coverage the scandal has had, it may also be influencing the terms of the debate in Scotland.

In Scotland, of course, there have been no scandals akin to Mid Staffs or anything like it, but the NHS in Scotland is facing unprecedented challenges of its own, as The Herald's campaign makes clear.

Alongside any strengthening of the Scottish NHS's regulatory regime, the case for a beds review remains as strong as ever. How problems in the NHS are dealt with is desperately important, but avoiding problems in the first place requires the service to be properly resourced and managed. A beds review remains essential to determining how that should be achieved.