Gloucester Road Medical Centre

About the practice

Gloucester Road is a large, friendly GP Practice just off the Gloucester Road (A38) in North Bristol, just two miles from the city centre. The surgery has car parking for 40 cars, including spaces designated for disabled users.

Automatic front doors ensure ease of access and all ground and first floor areas are level. Access to the first floor consulting rooms may be accessed by lift or stairs. The surgery has a fully accessible disabled WC facility on the ground floor and an assisted disabled WC on the first floor.

Gloucester Road offers routine appointments, from three days to four weeks in advance, offering patients an appointment with the clinician of their choice. Practice nurses are qualified to deal with many ailments and patients may be seen more quickly, so in certain cases patients can be offered an appointment with a practice nurse rather than a doctor.

Patients seeking same day appointments or urgent assistance throughout the day are offered a telephone call-back by the Urgent Care Team then, if needed, a face-to-face appointment.

The practice performs a number of in-house minor surgical procedures by appointment, including dedicated assisted clinics for the fit and removal of coils and implants.

The in-house clinical pharmacy team is an established point of contact for patients and staff who have medication and prescription related queries. They use their non-medical prescribing qualification to prescribe for patients within their areas of competence for conditions that have previously been diagnosed, resolving medication queries and undertaking reviews.

Gloucester Road Medical Centre is part of the North and West locality and is also in the Phoenix Primary Care Network with Horfield Health Centre.

Working environment, values and culture

The Practice’s staff survey reveals that the practice scores highly as a learning environment with those participating agreeing strongly that there are opportunities to pause and reflect on what the team does. There is also integrated learning and the practice welcomes and acts on input and suggestions from the team.

The results also reflected that the team work positively, with strong agreement that communication is good, people feel that it is easy to ask questions and the different disciplines and backgrounds work together as a well-coordinated team.

Staff also reflect that they would feel safe being treated at the practice as a patient and the culture in this work setting makes it easy to learn from others.

The perception of a good work/life balance is high.

The GP team meet daily for coffee and peer discussion. Heads of department, managers and GPs meet once a week for a business meeting. A minimum of two practice social events take place a year.

What we offer

The practice considers requests for flexible working, including home working, job sharing, term-time working, shift working, and moving from full-time work to part-time work.

The practice also offers paid maternity, paternity and adoption leave, dependants leave and flexible working.

Learning and development

New members of staff are supported to settle in with full induction, buddy scheme, mentoring scheme and social events. The induction also includes a full site tour, staff introductions, IT set-up and support, risk assessments and training needs analysis.

The practice believes that teaching and training are essential to developing the next generation of doctors and keeping the team and patients up-to-date with new ideas from training and hospital medicine.

Employees are encouraged to continue in their professional development and in support of this the practice will:

• Consider paid/unpaid time off for study
• Undertake regular reviews with the student
• Liaise as needed with the provider and support the student as appropriate
• Provide funding (if pre-agreed and subject to conditions)
• Make additional equipment, funding or other facilities available by agreement
• Provide feedback and offer advice
• Record progress

Staff are supported in a number of ways. Two hours are set aside each week for practice meetings which include business, case review, education sessions, significant events review and dedicated time for reception and nursing staff to meet with the GP team.

Monthly Gold Standard Framework and Safeguarding meetings are also scheduled; these are MDT meetings with the community nursing teams, midwives and St Peter’s Hospice in attendance.

Our patients

The practice has over 21,000 registered patients of all ages, including a large number of students. The list is open to new patients living in the practice boundary area.

The results of the 2021 GP Patient Survey indicate that 87% of patients describe their overall experience of this surgery as good.