AS anyone knows, the first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem.

No matter what it is, until you are honest enough to embrace that fact you will never improve.

You will always fall back on some tiny nugget to excuse yourself from being responsible.

And there, shrinking away from reality once again we have Oxfordshire County Council and NHS Oxfordshire.

Yesterday the Government released its monthly figures on bed-blocking that showed another jump in the statistics with Oxfordshire second worst in the country for dealing with the problem.

The Oxford Radcliffe Hospitals Trust — the other organisation most intimately involved in this serious issue — has no issue with the Government’s figures yet the county council and primary care trust do.

In a joint statement of management buzzwords that says little, they try to discredit the Government, claiming the figures don’t give a true reflection — the usual fallback position when something does not reflect well.

We also tried to get Arash Fatemian, the councillor charged with tackling bedblocking, to comment but he was unavailable yesterday. He was available, though, to go on Twitter.

This is a serious matter yet once again we worry that with their attempt to deflect any criticism, the county council and NHS Oxfordshire are just demonstrating they fail to truly understand the problem and therefore act effectively.