Surrey County Council has confirmed that it has sacked two social workers following the death of Banstead pensioner Gloria Foster but has refused to name them.

Mrs Foster, 81, was found near death by a district nurse who visited her home in Priory Court, Chipstead Road, Banstead, on January 24 last year.

She had been left without carers, who visited her four times a day to help dress, wash and feed her, for nine days after the care agency Care1st24, based in Sutton, was shut down following an immigration raid by police on January 15.

Mrs Foster, who had been suffering from dementia, depression, diabetes and a number of other health problems, died in Epsom Hospital on February 4.

At an inquest into her death, held at Woking Coroners’ Court, coroner Richard Travers heard social worker Elizabeth Egan, a senior practitioner for Surrey's adults care team at the time, admit that she had "failed" the pensioner by not following up an unanswered call she said she made to Mrs Foster to inform her of the raid.

Mrs Egan said she had been suffering from depression and burn-out, could not cope with her workload and wrongly believed that, as a self-funder, Mrs Foster could make her own alternative care arrangements.

Her manager, Jane Giles, the locality team manager for Reigate and Banstead at Surrey Adult Social Care at the time, said she had delegated the task of making alternative care arrangements for clients to Mrs Egan because she was a trusted member of the team. 

She acknowledged that she did not ask for specific assurances from Mrs Egan that alternative care arrangements had been found for all those who needed it.

Ms Giles told the court: "I think that under the pressure of the workload within the whole team that, right the way down from senior management, we took assumptions on what was happening and there was no clear loop for feedback.

"We all took the assumptions and that's where it went wrong and that was because of the context everyone was working in at the time."

Following a Serious Case Review into Mrs Foster’s death, published last September, Surrey County Council (SCC) said two members of staff had been suspended and that it would be taking disciplinary action in light of the review’s findings.

Following the inquest’s verdict, which found Mrs Foster had died from natural causes contributed to by neglect, SCC said: "We can confirm two members of staff have been dismissed as a result of this case."

But it refused to confirm or deny whether the two employees dismissed were Elizabeth Egan and Jane Giles and refused to say when they were dismissed.

This followed a statement SCC released after the inquest’s verdict saying "we’ll continue to do all we can to prevent anything like this happening again".