IN recent years, Oxfordshire has consistently been rated one of the worst areas in the UK for bed blocking - hospital patients being kept in beds for too long.

The body which holds our local health authorities to account for this failure is Healthwatch Oxfordshire.

Chairman Eddie Duller OBE, a former editor of the Oxford Mail, says that while local health bosses have some good plans to make improvements, the way they talk about them to the public frequently uses so much jargon as to make them "incomprehensible".

REPORTS of struggling health and social care services in Oxfordshire, in common with other parts of the country, are building up daily.

It is no secret that hospitals in the county are under severe pressure. Family doctors, who are generally the first link with the public, are equally strained, which is bad news when they are being flagged up as having an even greater role to play in the future as new plans are being formed to look after people nearer their homes.

The relentless pressure is being filtered down to social services, which are run by cash-strapped Oxfordshire County Council, and which are beginning to show signs of creaking under the strain.

They in turn are looking for greater support from voluntary organisations.

But some charities and other voluntary bodies previously supported by local authorities are also finding it difficult to continue as their grants are slashed.

That is the general picture at the moment, and it is a bleak one.

The authorities are well aware of the situation, but are they doing enough to put things right while they are planning for the future?

We highlighted the problem of discharge procedures from hospitals where elderly people were blocking wider usage of beds, largely through no fault of their own, while appropriate care was arranged for them within the community. A quick fix was arranged to provide more intermediate beds in care homes but the evidence points to this simply moving the blockage down the system.

The hospitals were supposed to come up with a reply to our recommendations within a reasonable space of time, but in practice they took six months to respond. At the time of writing, reports are reaching us to the effect that there has been little or no improvement in discharge procedures, particularly in the hospital pharmacies where patients being discharged are still being kept waiting for up to two hours for medicines.

Further reports claim elderly patients are being discharged late at night and even a case of a woman suffering from dementia who was discharged with no care package in place.

The whole picture that is emerging is that the level of care is of a high standard where it is being delivered, but getting that care and ensuring a smooth pathway to recovery is becoming more difficult. We are receiving high levels of complaints about the poor levels of communication between hospitals and patients and equally poor communication between hospital departments.

Although the county council has announced that it is training many more carers to cope with this plan to provide more care nearer to people's homes, it is equally obvious that voluntary organisations will have an increasingly important role to play, despite their funding from the local authorities being cut in many cases. The amount of work being done by voluntary organisations is staggering, although there is overlap and more could be achieved with greater co-ordination between them.

Amongst all this, the authorities are publishing plans for changes, although they use jargon to such an extent that it is incomprehensible. We have committed ourselves to translate these plans into plain English and they will shortly be available on our website at healthwatchoxfordshire.co.uk so that people can understand what is planned.

The health authorities should try harder to explain future plans by giving examples of how different types of treatment can be accessed nearer to people’s homes.

The opening of a new health campus in Henley is a good example of progress and it gives the health authorities a great opportunity to show how new models of care can work, although some centres will be different to others because of local needs. There are some interesting experiments taking place in different parts of the county, with the aim of improving access to GPs.

It would be good to have some positive news about the success of these initiatives.