Nurse tells PM to fix social care to end overcrowding

Silvia Marko met the prime minister at Downing Street last week

A nurse has told the prime minister that he must fix a crisis in social care to reduce overcrowding in hospitals.

Silvia Marko, who works at Wexham Park Hospital in Slough, had been invited to meet Sir Keir Starmer in Downing Street following his speech on how he plans to "fix the foundations" of Britain last week.

Ms Marko said she talked about her job and the problems she faced at the meeting on 27 August.

The A&E nurse told Starmer that overcrowding was one of the biggest problems facing emergency departments across the country.

“When the prime minister asked us what suggestions we could give, I referred to how we can solve the overcrowding issue in A&E, which is to solve social care,” she said.

Ms Marko said that overcrowding happens in A&E departments when hospital wards are unable to discharge patients needing social care packages.

A BBC investigation last year found that on an average day, around 13,300 patients fit to be discharged from hospitals in England are not able to leave – around 58 per cent.

The most reported reason was that they were still waiting for social care packages to be put in place – due to a lack of beds in other settings, such as care homes and community hospitals.

Ms Marko said this can have a knock-on effect on A&Es.

She said: “We have to be able to send people to the wards, which is sometimes impossible because they can’t discharge people back to the community.

"That means people stay in A&E longer because there are no beds to send people to the wards.”

Ms Marko said the prime minister "didn’t answer straight away", but he said it was "something he’s going to think about".

“Social care is a big issue and I wasn’t expecting him to give us an answer straight away. He obviously wanted to listen to our suggestions and our thoughts.”