It is hard to open a column by praising the Scottish Government. I know, for the past couple of days I have been mulling over how to do it without guaranteeing that readers will have already turned to the next page.

Perhaps, instead, I should go on (again) about some of the frustrations of running The Herald’s NHS Time for Action campaign – which calls for better national planning to ensure Scotland has the services in place to look after the growing elderly population and a public debate about the choices ahead.

But the truth is, at this moment in time, the Scottish Government are both working on a longer term NHS plan and holding a national conversation discussing what it will say.

I am no longer asking the question: Why aren’t they doing this? But, how well will it be done? Which is progress.

Furthermore there is no point sitting at the sidelines complaining (albeit in an informed way) if you are not prepared to muck in and help out when someone says: “We’ll do something about this – we were actually going to anyway.”

So at the end of last month The Herald held a joint Health Summit with the Scottish Government bringing 25 readers together with Health Secretary Shona Robison, top NHS executives and folk from other key health bodies to talk about the future.

It was, at times, a heated event with strong opinions and some attendees – who feel they have heard the same rhetoric before - questioning whether they were being heard. But a lot of crucial points were made and I curse myself now for not standing at the front with a marker pen, recording it in a way that all could see.

It also occurred to me afterwards, that if ministers are serious about consulting the public on the future of the NHS, it should be them asking the audience the questions – not the other way around. If you poke around the Scottish Government’s “national conversation” website - http://healthier.scot/ - you’ll find they are posing questions to the public in other ways.

At the summit, Ms Robson briefly outlined a timetable for outlining their new long term healthcare strategy which includes publishing some of the key “principals” behind it in the autumn. The potential warm cosy vagueness of this, I have to say, fills me with dread. NHS Scotland is not short of well intentioned slogans that no-one could disagree with. If we get more of this I might explode. But, that said, they could produce a meaningful document. To pick up from messages coming across at the summit it could say:

Do more research on social care to inform best practice.

Provide up front funding to improve community services. Ensure they target frail pensioners before they hit crisis.

Drive up standards for follow-up care.

Re-examine the benefits/ drawbacks of centralising some acute services.

Build robust strategies to address both immediate and long term shortages of nurses and doctors.

Spend (a bit) less energy measuring how quickly operations are done, and more finding out how well they went.

Attempt to bring other political parties behind these aims.

And finally, don’t just talk about this list – do it.

If this comes to pass, I’ll be left wondering how to write another column praising the Scottish Government.