Staff groups of various kinds are an important part of the life of a psychiatric hospital, yet there have been few attempts to document and assess their functioning. This would seem particularly important at present when the ‘multidisciplinary approach’ is regarded as an ideal in the treatment of the psychiatrically ill. Yet, many who have had experience of multidisciplinary groups are aware that they sometimes create as many problems as they solve. In this project, three multidisciplinary groups were formed from within the staff of a psychiatric hospital, cutting across the usual boundaries of ward and administrative teams, with the aim of studying the groups as representations of the institution and attempting to facilitate participants' functioning in the wider interdisciplinary setting.