Trust boosts team working thanks to Love Island

Staff at Guy’s and St Thomas’ have been inspired by popular reality show Love Island to create a new initiative to help teams to work more closely together.

The senior management team for the Trust’s gastrointestinal medicine and surgery department “couple up” to form 12 pairs each week, and then visit different areas within the department to meet staff and enhance workforce relations.

Each week there is a “recoupling” when the senior management team couple up with someone new, and are then allocated a new area to visit that week.

The idea is that members of the team - which includes the head of nursing, general manager, clinical director and quality and improvement lead among many others – are coupled with someone they would not usually work closely with from the management team, and meet staff within areas of the department which they would not often be based in.

The initiative started in June and has been running ever since. It has proved so successful that the team want to continue it for the foreseeable future, even though the ITV2 series has now ended.

Anjali Joshi, general manager of the gastrointestinal medicine and surgery department, said: “Before our daily catch up meetings, some of the senior managers would catch up about what had happened in the previous night’s episode of Love Island. We decided that coupling up and visiting staff within the department, which consists of around 400 employees, would be a great way to get to know staff better and make us all more familiar with the department’s different clinical and non-clinical areas.

“Our quality and improvement lead decides who should be recoupled with who each week so luckily no one has been dumped so far, unlike in Love Island!”

The project has already had many benefits within just a couple of months of it being launched.

Anjali added: “Staff feel very valued and listened to. Meeting staff from across the department allows us to understand the intricacies of their roles on a day-to-day basis and to ensure that they have the support they need do their jobs as effectively as possible.

“The initiative has improved relationships and teams within the department are now working more closely together. I always introduce myself to staff by saying I’m in my Love Island couple for the week – injecting some fun into our work has been a real success. Some of the senior management team have even gone the extra mile by buying the Love Island water bottles!”