THERE’S an old saying: if you want something done properly, do it yourself. That is what appears to have happened with the county hospital authority stepping in to tackle Oxfordshire’s chronic bed blocking crisis.

Getting people who are well enough to go home out of hospital beds is vital for Oxford University Hospitals NHS Trust.

If beds aren’t free then patients can’t be moved from A&E and planned operations are cancelled as people will have no bed to recover in.

Great changes have been made in medicine and practice in recent years so fewer and fewer people need a bed and can go home the same day.

But it is inevitable – especially with an ageing population with myriad health problems – that beds will still be needed.

They are the bedrock of the hospital.

Until now the trust has had to wait for Oxfordshire County Council to get care firms to respond in time to support people at home so they can leave hospital.

Taking matters into its own hands is common sense – sorting out a problem within one organisation is arguably going to happen quicker than between two.

This isn’t what Margaret Thatcher envisaged when the NHS “internal market” was set up in the early 1990s to get results through competition and separation of providers. This also relied on private providers to step in where needed.

That’s all very well, but a real challenge in Oxfordshire comes when care firms struggle to recruit staff in one of the most expensive area’s of the country.

We hope the trust’s labours will pay off and circumvent barriers between organisations. As long as managers can enforce efficiency and not give in to the complacency that gives critics of the public sector so much ammunition then it could make a real difference to patients and their relatives.