How Royal Star and Garter made a data-driven leap with PCS for smarter staffing

15 May 2025 | Tom Owens
Updated 2 July 2026 | Suzanne Worthington

For the last 100 years, Royal Star & Garter has been supporting veterans living with disability or dementia and providing a range of quality care and therapy services. The group began in 1916 as a service to support injured military personnel returning from the First World War. It's evolved into three state-of-the art care homes, with a fourth on the way, where highly skilled and motivated staff meet the care needs of residents with empathy and compassion.

The quality of Royal Star & Garter has been recognised by the industry and by regulators: they've been placed in the 'Top 20 Care Home Groups' three times, won many other awards and the High Wycombe care home was rated Outstanding by the CQC in 2023.

We spoke to Kelda Fasasi, Head of Innovation for Royal Star & Garter, to discuss how our Staffing and Dependency tool has improved how they deliver care.

Before and after: The transformation effect

Kelda Fasasi Head of Innovation at Royal Star & Garter

'At Royal Star & Garter we’ve always embraced change and innovation, especially when it comes to improving how we deliver care. This mindset guided our transformation as we began to use and benefit from emerging digital technologies.

'One of the most significant steps in that journey was implementing mCare, PCS’s digital care planning system.

'While mCare offers many capabilities for supporting care dependency, we needed deeper, more dynamic insights to build on, such as real-time data to support consistent, informed decision-making across recruitment, quality and safety.

'When we learned that PCS also offered a Staffing and Dependency tool, we knew it could meet all our needs.

'Previously, we were using a bit of a mishmash of Excel sheets to try and stay on top of dependency and staffing. In search of a better solution, I reached out to a contact in another service for recommendations. They shared four tools, but each had gaps and issues, even combining the best parts didn’t meet our needs, until we saw a demonstration of PCS’s Staffing and Dependency tool and realised what was possible.

'We were blown away just by the demo. It was straightforward and clearly designed with care professionals in mind.

'What makes the Staffing and Dependency tool so valuable is that it compliments rather than replaces - it doesn’t discount your experience as a manager or a care worker. While some people fear that digital tools might diminish the human element of care, using this tool provides the perfect balance: the human touch augmented by data. It supports your instincts built through years of experience in care and helps you to turn them into actionable information for smarter staffing decisions.

'With that in mind, adopting the Staffing and Dependency tool alongside our use of mCare was a no brainer - we didn’t have to be sold on it.'

Easy to implement

'What stood out for us was how easy it was to implement the Staffing and Dependency tool. The process is very straightforward: just input all your resident information into the system – names, number of beds – and that’s most of the work that needs to be done. That was even more straightforward for us because we were already using mCare. This meant we could avoid inputting data twice - we just pulled it through from mCare and it went into the Staffing and Dependency tool immediately, which saved us so much time and effort.

'What made this process even more intuitive was the User Guide. When we first started to use the tool, we made full use of the guide that's embedded in the platform. So if we weren’t sure what a particular section meant, we could hover on it and see a detailed description. This saved us time because we didn’t have to keep going back and forth to consult an external guide. Features like this are great examples of how intuitive the platform is, and how it was designed with the care worker in mind.'

Unexpected benefits

'Many of the tool’s benefits are obvious: more efficient staffing, more accurate dependency scores. But we also found that it brings holistic benefits that we hadn’t considered. For example, the process of implementing the system – inputting the resident and staff data – wasn't just a case of me sitting alone with my laptop. Instead, it was a collaborative experience that encouraged everyone to work closer together and allowed care colleagues to showcase how much knowledge they have about those they care for.

'The tool gave us a space to question and challenge ourselves, to think about the best person to fill in each resident section. It gave us key insights into how we needed to work from day one.

'The first entry took about 20 minutes to input but when we were familiar with the system, that time reduced greatly. From then on, it took no more than 10 minutes per entry. From there, the Staffing and Dependency tool can be updated as often you need and takes very little time.'

Seamless integration between care planning and staffing tools 

'The data provided by the platform is easy to read and understand, plus t’s very user friendly and presented clearly, with all the most important information clearly viewable in the main dashboard. It’s helped us to improve consistency because now it’s expected that every home keeps the Staffing and Dependency tool updated. Because of this, we’ve been able to highlight patterns and share learnings across our homes.

'That consistency is easy because we can pull data through from mCare into the Staffing and Dependency tool - this means we have uniform information on resident needs across our digital platforms. It saves us a huge amount of time when, for example, a new resident comes in and we add them to the system. From the very start, mCare makes the process much easier and more accurate.

'Before a person moves in, we do thorough due diligence. For example, clinical leads conduct care assessments. But in reality, there's often a short window of time to get a lot of information down. So when we’re trying to paint a picture of someone who might be coming to us from hospital, we’re lucky because we can use PCS’s integration with GP Connect to pull the information through. It goes into mCare and then into the Staffing and Dependency tool.'

Decisions backed up by data

'One of the best things about the Staffing and Dependency tool is that it helps our home managers or senior team members add considerable weight to what they’re saying, because everything is reinforced by data. When we have staffing issues, the tool gives us clear-cut data that shows when and where we need staff the most.

'The same data is also invaluable for external use. Whether it’s to justify higher fees based on higher needs of residents or to use as proof for improved local authority funding, it gives us evidence on  what we need to provide the best possible care, and it eliminates the chance of wasted recourses. You can show the level of support you're offering and use that as the basis for what can be improved.

'These insights, coupled with the level of detail in care records available through mCare, means we can provide a full 360-degree view on our methods and practices.'

Improves compliance

'On our compliance journey, we’ve taken great steps to overhaul our audit process, and the Staffing and Dependency tool has helped us do that. The local authorities have been asking more questions about how we calculate dependency. For them, it isn’t good enough anymore to just say, ‘We’re using an Excel spreadsheet’ or we just ‘know’. That kind of response isn’t acceptable anymore.

'We needed something more solid. With the Staffing and Dependency tool, we’ve been able to demonstrate compliance by showing that we've identified areas where previously we didn’t know we had issues, and that we're taking steps to make things better.

'We've also been able to show the depth of our efforts to improve care provision. It’s been said that when it comes to compliance, providing care is only half of it. You must show how you’re doing it. Now we can go to the local authorities and say, we’re doing a lot more than you think we are, and here's the proof. We wouldn’t be without this tool now.'

Reducing agency reliance and cutting costs

'The Staffing and Dependency tool hasn’t just improved our care provision, and staffing decision-making and streamlined our overall operations through integration with mCare, but it’s also helped us save money. One crucial way it’s done this is by helping us to reduce our agency usage across all homes.

'While we're a not-for-profit organisation, it’s still essential that we remain financially stable, particularly in today’s changing climate. The Staffing and Dependency tool has reduced our agency spend because it helped us make the most of the staff we have, where they're best suited and when, and in what mix of skills.

'It's helped us pinpoint when and where staff have been brought in unnecessarily. When we started using the tool, we understood the best ways to maximise the resources we had. It’s all down to the efficiency of the system, which helped us be more efficient with our staffing.'

Realising the potential of digital transformation

'Where we found the most value was in how mCare and the Staffing and Dependency tool worked together to help us streamline and integrate our data. We didn’t have to input data multiple times, we could just pull it through from mCare and use it to start calculating dependency.

'We couldn’t go back to what we were doing before, and we’ve found that using the Staffing and Dependency tool has been crucial for us to take that next step in the journey of digital transformation.

'I can't recommend the tool, or working with PCS, highly enough.'