A FAMILY doctor leading a new GPs body has stepped up to tackle Oxfordshire’s bed-blocking crisis head-on.

Dr Stephen Richards said the number of patients left stuck in their hospital beds had been a “stain on the county for many years” and past attempts to solve the issue had failed.

But as county councillors grilled health bosses at a crunch meeting yesterday, Dr Richards said the new Acceptable Care for Everyone (Ace) board would for the first time oversee a pooled budget and involve top clinicians from across health and social care bodies.

Oxfordshire’s bed-blocking figures remain the second worst in England, with thousands of patients left stranded in hospital each year when they should be getting care elsewhere.

Dr Richards was elected to lead the Oxfordshire GP Consortium in April, and staged a nine-hour meeting in July to tackle bed-blocking with top council officials and health clinicians.

The new Ace board set up as a result, chaired by Dr Richards, will work out how to simplify patients’ “over-complicated” journeys between different health bodies – the Oxford Radcliffe Hospitals Trust, NHS Oxfordshire, the county council and Oxford Health – and ensure money is spent where it is needed.

Dr Richards told the Oxford Mail: “If we can understand these two issues, patient flow and money flow, then we are in business.”

He added: “This could have happened before but it didn’t.

“There is no single answer as to why.

“We have not had four organisations with their chief executives agreeing to work in an integrated way to sort out the problem.

“The culture and behaviour I have seen in the last few months is dramatically different to anything I have seen before.”

He said he hoped for a “significant reduction” in bed-blocking figures by the end of the financial year, with numbers continuing to fall through 2012.

Currently, he said the equivalent of four wards at Oxford Radcliffe Trust – or 80 people – were filled with bed-blockers, and 2,000 treated patients were left stuck in acute beds each year.

Hospital trust chief executive Sir Jonathan Michael said so many beds were filled with people fit to leave that the trust paid private providers to perform operations elsewhere.