Case study: Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust

Grace Lewis  

27 Oct 2015
The budget-conscious employer created its own ‘dating service’ to boost mentoring and
career progression
The health sector has faced its fair share of political and funding turmoil in recent years, and
even an organisation of Guy’s and St Thomas’s stature has felt the pressure, admits Ann
Macintyre, director of workforce at the NHS Foundation Trust. But with 13,650 staff spread
across 36 central London sites, and an annual turnover of £1.3 billion, Guy’s and St Thomas’ has
a reputation to uphold, as well as stringent quality and efficiency targets to meet.
While the HR team may recognise that the answer to providing world-class care lies in
empowering and upskilling the talent to deliver it, convincing a workforce that is not known for its
inward-looking tendencies is easier said than done.
“NHS staff find it hard to look after themselves because their main role is to help others,” says
Hannah Reed, coaching and mentoring project manager at the Trust. “But the fact that many
employees were already accessing coaches and mentors outside the organisation before I
arrived shows they are eager to develop.”
Reed was recruited in 2013 with the brief to implement an organisation-wide professional
development strategy, and launch a coaching and mentoring (C&M) programme across the
Trust.
“We were missing an opportunity around developing our own teams and having peer networks as
part of ongoing progression,” Macintyre says. “The C&M programme blends nicely with our wider
education and training strategy, especially when it comes to leadership development.”
With limited budget to recruit external coaching specialists, the C&M scheme relies completely
on staff volunteers inside the organisation. All employees are invited to register their interest in
becoming either a coach or mentor, or providing careers advice, via a website specifically
designed for the programme. “When you register, you can select where you work, the hours you
work, what kind of help you are looking for and what role you would like your coach or mentor to
have. I then try to find someone who can meet those needs,” Reed says.
Since its launch, around 130 staff have signed up to become a mentor, and 105 have chosen to
provide coaching support. By October 2015, 350 individuals had committed to meet with their
‘match’ for one hour every month, for six months, which Reed says is an epic achievement for
such a busy workforce, which last year had more than two million patient contacts.
The process of connecting a candidate to a coach or mentor is not quite as simple as ‘swipe right
for yes, left for no’, but sifting through the pool of volunteers is something that Reed not only
does personally, but also enjoys. “It’s really fun to do these little social experiments and guess
who would work well with who, a bit like a dating website,” she says.
An initial face-to-face meeting helps to determine whether the ‘match’ is compatible, and Reed
isn’t averse to changing the pairings if either coach or mentee isn’t feeling comfortable. “This is a
one-on-one service, and if you don’t feel like you can be open and honest with your match, it
won’t work.”
Reed promises to match volunteers “again and again until we get it right”. Her record so far is re-
matching a junior doctor four times – a rate she’s hoping not to beat as more and more
volunteers from different areas of the organisation sign up to the scheme.
“People join the programme because they are thinking about their next step,” she says. “Being
part of this network helps them to navigate and succeed in the organisation a bit quicker than
they would have done otherwise.”
After requests from the volunteers for greater recognition and to give the programme more
rigour, Reed and her team developed an accreditation system based on the skills and experience
achieved by working as a coach or mentor. The volunteers work towards five levels of
qualification, and gain CPD and accredited coaching hours along the way.
“It would be easy for me to say the programme is one of the reasons that we rate third in the
country in terms of staff satisfaction [according to the latest NHS staff survey], but it is almost
impossible to determine the direct correlation,” says Macintyre. “I’d like to think this is just part of
an offering that makes people here feel supported and able to develop.”
Coaching and mentoring skills are at the heart of many of the existing courses on offer at the
Trust, Reed says, and it is often this branch of training that piques the interest of staff. Even so, it
has been necessary to educate them first on what coaching and mentoring actually involve.
When it comes to deciding who is best suited for which role, Guy’s and St Thomas’ has its own
definition: “A coach believes that the person they are supporting has all the knowledge and
experience in them, and it is just a case of using techniques to bring it out,” says Reed. “A
mentor is usually someone more experienced in their field of work, and can offer help and
support depending on that field.” 
Two years in, Reed has adapted the scheme to address some of the challenges mentors and
coaches were facing, including finding time to meet with their match, and a lack of resources to
make the most of the time allocated. The programme is now ‘protected’ under the study leave
policy, and each coach or mentor’s commitment to the programme is measured in their annual
appraisal.
“One of the biggest challenges has been demonstrating the benefits in terms of hard facts and
numbers,” says Reed. In May 2014, she invited London South Bank University to conduct an
official evaluation of the programme. It recognised that the career development opportunities
could have a direct impact on increasing staff retention and morale. “I have learned to be specific
and upfront about what we are offering staff,” says Reed. “Yes, you are doing us and your
colleagues a favour by volunteering, but look at what you can get in return.”
As well as regular CPD supervision events and an organisation-wide weekly newsletter to
recognise the volunteers, and attract new candidates to the programme, Reed updates her email
signature every quarter with the volunteers’ satisfaction rates. “After six months, staff complete
an exit survey on the programme, and the latest figures suggest that 95 per cent of employees
who accessed a trust coach or mentor would recommend it to others, which I am immensely
proud of,” says Reed. “We just have to work on the remaining 5 per cent.”