The transfer of services currently run by Southern Health NHS Foundation Trust in Oxfordshire is likely to take two years, councillors were told today.

Last year it was agreed that the beleaguered health trust's £5.5m contract with Oxfordshire County Council to provide specialist adult learning disability services would not be extended beyond December 31, 2015.

A supported living service for about 220 people in the county run by Southern Health was movedto six new service providers on April 1 this year.

The contract for learning disability specialist health services will be transferred from Oxfordshire County Council to Oxfordshire Clinical Commissioning Group from June 2016, which will then hold a contract with Southern Health.

After that services will be moved from Southern Health to other providers, including Oxford University Hospitals Trust and Oxford Health.

The whole process is due to be finished by December 2017.

Southern Health came under fire after the "preventable" death of Oxford 18-year-old Connor Sparrowhawk at its Slade House unit in Headington in 2013.

An inquest last year concluded that the incident was "contributed to by neglect".

In December last year the now-infamous Mazars report from NHS England revealed that 722 people with learning difficulties and mental health problems had died unexpectedly while in contact with Southern Health over four years.

At a meeting of the county council's Health Overview and Scrutiny Committee today, chairwoman Yvonne Constance told representatives from Southern Health: "Yours is an organisation that has really felt the heat.

"You are acknowledged for providing very good quality of care and are not an outlier in terms of the number of deaths that you experienced, although I was astonished at the number."