by John Macgill

Today a small team of three journalists published their 1000^th story about health and social care in Scotland.

It was a report on investigations into bullying in Argyll and Bute.

Story 999 was, fittingly, about a proposed Holyrood bill to make it a legal requirement that all defibrillators are registered with the Scottish Ambulance Service.

healthandcare.scot launched as a news service late last year and began publishing news, commentary, podcasts and briefings in earnest in early January. By then our first reporter, Sarah, had been joined by Henry. Then, over the summer, they became a band of three when Judith joined from the Sunday Post.

healthandcare.scot is centred on a website. We are also to be found in the busy world of Twitter @hacsot.

Some stories celebrate new ways of doing things – such as the communities providing beach wheelchairs, the introduction of tattooless radiotherapy and a partnership to provide new opportunities for people with learning disabilities in Dundee.

Many involve local reporting of the Integration Joint Boards that oversee £9bnof spending by Scotland’s health and social care partnerships, including the occasional instance where board members and officials have not seen eye to eye.

healthandcare.scot’s purpose is to fill a gap as the legacy news organisations reduce their headcount in Scotland, leaving almost everything done by the 1.2 million people delivering health and care in Scotland unreported.

When the hope and expectation of leaders is that health and care teams should share information about what works, works well and doesn’t work, it seemed extraordinary to me that there was no single place where people could go to see if their great idea was already somebody else’s successful programme.

Equally, with the handful of dedicated health reporters and correspondents in Scotland often tied up reporting big-ticket items such as waiting times and new hospitals, there is a lot of bandwidth left that we can fill with updates from the 87 partnerships, councils and health boards, with the achievements of care providers and carers, with the insights of local and national charities and campaigning organisations; and the voices of experience of those delivering in a place called ‘the frontline’, be it a health centre, an allotment, a lunch club or a bedside.

In business terms the hope is that, in due course, we will be able to find income streams by matching people offering products and services for the health and social care sectors with the people in this community that they hope will use them.

So, 1000 stories in, have any of the grand ambitions been realised?

Analytics suggest around 3000 people are visiting our website each month while our tweets enjoy 70,000 ‘impressions’. Even more exciting is that people are now coming to us with a remarkable mix of stories.

As publisher I have resisted the urge to relive my days as a journalist, so I leave the task of writing stories to people who are still reporters.

And, given that the money for this venture was made through my Ettrickburn consultancy, I am acutely aware that the independence and objectivity of healthandcare.scot would be undermined in a millisecond by any perception that any past or present consultancy client could enjoy warm and cuddly coverage (unless, of course, they want to pay for advertorial space which will be unambiguously marked as such).

I look forward to updating you ever so often on how we are getting on.