COUNTY councillors will tomorrow discuss how best to help elderly patients in Oxfordshire who are forced to stay in hospital while waiting for social care.

The county council's performance last year on preventing delayed discharges from acute hospital beds was the worst of 20 shire counties, a study has suggested.

The counties submitted figures for delayed transfers in 2006-7 as part of a "benchmarking" exercise run by PricewaterhouseCoopers, the council's opposition Labour group has disclosed.

Oxfordshire topped the list, with 69 delays per week per 100,000 people aged over 65. The second-placed council had only 43, according to the report.

The issue is being discussed tomorrow at County Hall by the council's social and community services scrutiny committee.

Barbara Gatehouse, leader of the Labour group, said: "Oxfordshire's most frail and vulnerable citizens deserve a better deal from their county council."

She claimed earlier this year that the problem was costing the NHS in the county more than £3m a year.

She added: "It's a bit rich for the Tories to complain about the state of the NHS when they're blocking so many of its beds.

"Our local NHS should not have to spend millions of pounds bailing out the county council."

Last month, it emerged that 45 people who had been waiting in community hospitals for council-funded social care had waited on average for 48 days.

They were taking up almost one fifth of the county's total of 243 community hospital beds, despite not needing health care.

Jim Couchman, cabinet member for social and community services, said: "The council and its health service partners have a joint responsibility to reduce further the relatively small number of people who remain in hospital after they have been deemed medically fit to leave acute care.

"Some of these patients are waiting for a community hospital bed, others are waiting for a social care-funded package, while others are self-funders who are choosing which care home to go to.

"As defined by the Commission for Social Care Inspection's measurements, Oxfordshire's figures are acceptable but in need of improvement'.

"Accordingly Oxfordshire's social and health services have jointly put in place a number of steps to bring the figure down."

Helen Peggs, a spokesman for the Oxford Radcliffe Hospitals NHS Trust, said patients should generally be discharged from acute hospitals, such as the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford or The Horton in Banbury, as soon as they were fit enough to be cared for elsewhere.

She added: "Some patients need a period of time in a community hospital, the care of a residential or nursing home or support at home.

"At the end of this process, however, the type of care needed by the patient is not always readily available, and people remain in our beds longer than is good for them."