Royal Star & Garter, a charity which provides residential care for veterans is highlighting its investment in its Nurses, ahead of International Nurses Day.

Royal Star & Garter provides loving, compassionate care to veterans and their partners living with disability or dementia. It has also launched new services into the community.

The charity has a proud tradition of training and upskilling staff at its three Homes, in Solihull, Surbiton and High Wycombe.

International Nurses Day is celebrated on 12 May each year. Its theme this year, as chosen by the International Council of Nurses (ICN), is ‘The economic power of care’. It highlights the need for nursing to be seen as an investment, instead of a cost, and to reshape perceptions of nursing’s economic and societal benefits.

Royal Star & Garter played a critical part in the roll-out of the pioneering Nursing Associate course, commissioned by Health Education England (HEE) to bridge the gap between Healthcare Assistants and Nurses, by providing placements to Nursing Associate trainees since the pilot began in 2017. And since 2019, staff at its Homes have been supported by the charity to train as Nursing Associates. A number of these newly qualified Nursing Associates are now undertaking further training as Registered Nurses.

The charity’s investment in its staff has brought other direct benefits for its residents. Royal Star & Garter paid for two of the Lead Nurses at its Solihull Home to train as Non-medical Prescribers. These Nurses can now prescribe from an approved formulary, enabling residents to receive diagnosis and medication promptly, without having to wait for a GP call-out. The NMPs are able to provide rapid on-site responses to residents, whom they know well and can quickly recognise if they are deteriorating. They are able to prescribe medication and deliver it to residents within hours.

As well as reducing health deterioration and the distress caused as residents wait for a GP, this has generated significant costs savings both for the local GP service and the NHS by reducing hospital admissions.

Nurses have also been actively involved in the delivery of the charity’s Developing Care Together programme. This ongoing project sees Royal Star & Garter’s Healthcare Assistants trained up to a Level 3 Diploma in Adult Care supported by in-person and online training as well as detailed observations in practice by Clinical Nurse Educators. Learning new or enhanced skills further improves the award-winning person-centred care delivered to residents.

‘Celebrate the work of our Nurses’

Royal Star & Garter’s Director of Care & Wellbeing, Shirley Hall, said: “We value our Nurses and by investing in them, we invest in their futures and ours. I’m delighted to celebrate the work of our Nurses and our commitment to them as we start to deliver an enhanced training programme for them later this year. I am particularly proud that we are supporting the International Council of Nurses’ economic power of care theme.”

Anyone interested in working with Royal Star & Garter can go to https://starandgarter.org/work-for-us/

The charity is welcoming new residents into each of its three Homes. For more information on this, or its new services, go to www.starandgarter.org