The Herald launched the NHS: Time for Action campaign on July 15 2013.
The previous winter hundreds of patients had waited on trolleys for hours in accident and emergency departments because of the shortage of hospital beds. Health boards opened extra ward capacity to help them cope and some of these beds were still being used in May.
Organisations such as the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh and the Royal College of Nursing were issuing increasingly serious warnings about the pressure on staff and hospital capacity.
Then The Herald learned that, while the Scottish Government had blamed the winter chaos on outbreaks of a vomiting bug and respiratory illness, emergency doctors had actually warned ministers that they were struggling to cope months before seasonal viruses hit. The College of Emergency Medicine had written to former Health Secretary Nicola Sturgeon warning that 21 out of 24 A&E departments in the country were regularly unsafe because of the number of patients backing up, queuing for ward beds.
To be fair, both Ms Sturgeon and her successor Alex Neil met with the college to discuss solutions and millions was invested in the frontline of Scottish hospitals including 18 extra A&E consultants.
But, this did not deal with the underlying problems - the number of frail patients arriving in their departments with health problems and the apparent shortage of beds for them.
For years there had been discussion about the growing elderly population and the need to enhance care services to look after them better in the community so the frail were less likely to wind up in hospital. All political parties had signed up to this plan outlined in a document called the 2020 Vision, but there was little detail about how it was to be achieved.
The Herald began calling for a review of capacity in both the NHS and social care to plan the resources required to look after the rising number of elderly people.
As Ms Robison noted in her speech to Holyrood yesterday (thurs) there will be an extra 779000 pensioners over the age of 75 by 2031 - a rise of 83 per cent.
The Herald said the Scottish Government needed to review services. We said they had to find out how well schemes to care for the elderly in their homes would work and plan the staff needed to look after them as well as the hospital capacity required to cope with the numbers who would inevitably need some emergency treatment.
For the last year and a half we have charted in detail the signs that both the health and social care systems are under enormous strain. This issues have included drastic shortages of middle grade emergency doctors, the number of patients lodged in the wrong hospital department for their medical problem because of the lack of space and the number of social work budgets overspent months before the end of the financial year.
As 2014 progressed The Herald also exposed the building problem of delayed discharges - patients who are stuck on wards because they are waiting for social care to be organised for them in the community.
At the end of last year Audit Scotland published a hard-hitting report which echoed many of our concerns and raised serious questions about whether the 2020 Vision was going to be realised.
January 2015 started rather like January 2013 - with headlines about the patients lying for hours in A&Es.
Three weeks, under the new Health Secretary Shona Robison, there has been an announcement of £100m to tackle delayed discharges and help keep patients out of hospital. And now - at long last - there has been an admission that more action does need to be taken to both move care into the community and plan, in more detail, the future of the NHS.
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