OXFORDSHIRE’S hospitals are reducing the number of patients who are stuck on the wards despite being well enough to leave, it emerged last night.

The Oxford Mail reported in January that non-urgent operations were being cancelled at Oxford’s John Radcliffe and Churchill hospitals and The Horton, in Banbury, because of a bed shortage.

This was blamed on a sharp rise in emergency admissions, due to winter illnesses and falls, coinciding with long delays in discharging patients who no longer needed treatment at the three hospitals.

Patients who are well enough to leave but are waiting for arrangements to be made for beds elsewhere or for social care to help them return home are classed as bed-blockers.

The Oxford Radcliffe Hospitals NHS Trust, which runs the John Radcliffe, Churchill and Horton, said there had been a peak of 174 bed-blocking cases in October last year.

Last night there were about 90 patients taking up beds in the three hospitals who are awaiting places at the county’s community hospitals, in nursing homes or for support to be arranged at their own homes.

The charity Age UK said it was encouraging that the hospital trust was starting to turn around the bed-blocking crisis, which was one of the worst in the country.

But it also warned against complacency and said a lot more needed to be done to solve the problem in the long term.

Paul Cann, chief executive of Age UK Oxfordshire, said: “We were nearly the worst local authority in the country for this, so it’s encouraging to learn of the drop.

“This is down to hardworking care staff and their managers, who have turned this situation around.

“We’re clearly going in the right direction but I think we have to do a lot more.

“Oxfordshire shouldn’t be complacent about the fact we have dropped.”

The ORH Trust said it had been working with Oxfordshire County Council, which is responsible for providing the social care in the community, which allows patients to be discharged from hospital, to solve the bed-blocking problems.

Last year the council was charged £10,000 by the Royal Berkshire Hospital, in Reading, which claimed that it was not doing enough to prevent bed-blocking by arranging alternative care for patients sent to the hospital from south Oxfordshire.

The council has said it is working on making social care arrangements more efficient and ways to stop some people needing to go into the hospitals in the first place.