Courtside Surgery

About the practice

Courtside Surgery aims to place the patient at the heart of quality medical care.

The team strives to maintain the best elements of a traditional style of personal, friendly, accessible general practice with a focus on continuity of care, within the constraints of an increasingly part-time work force, through a team based approach, which reacts quickly and sensitively to daily demands.

Purpose-built and recently extended, the surgery premises provide modern, well equipped, air conditioned accommodation. All consulting rooms are on the ground floor and have excellent access. Admin offices are upstairs along with a staff room and conference room.

All patients are allocated to a named GP supported by a wider team approach to patient care.

Courtside is also a teaching practice for University of Bristol, teaching all five years of students, and a training practice for the Severn Deanery, with currently two GP registrars.

The practice has a strong ten person nursing team, including two nurse practitioners who treat minor illnesses. One of the practice nurses runs a sexual health clinic, fitting coils and implants, three of the GPs provide minor surgery and all practice nurses specialise in Asthma, COPD and Diabetes Care.

Same-day and bookable appointments are available, as are telephone consultations. Patients are not clinically triaged but the reception team do ask for details of symptoms so that the most appropriate clinician can be booked.

The practice has embraced technological advances and is an accredited paperless practice with all incoming clinical documents handled electronically. Patients can book appointments , view their medical record and request repeat prescriptions online.

Courtside works closely with our neighbouring practices in Yate as part of a cluster.

Working environment, values and culture

Staff turnover at Courtside is low and feedback received from 2017’s appraisal process and a practice culture survey is positive.

The team takes pride in the surgery and aspires to work well together to provide a patient-centred, democratic, happy, coherent and informal work place. This is achieved through a strong, supportive team culture. All staff are provided with excellent educational support.

Starting with an environment where patients and staff are respected and the practice is well regarded in the local community, and aims to build a team of well-trained and well-motivated staff, with good communication processes across the practice and with patients.

Regular clinical meetings are convened on a range of topics and all clinical staff are invited to attend. Individual teams also meet on a regular basis and all clinicians endeavour to have lunch together to catch up with colleagues on an informal basis.

The practice holds a weekly multi-disciplinary team meeting with community colleagues to discuss high priority cases. Weekly in-house meetings are attended by all clinical staff and the practice management team, including regular significant event meetings, educational sessions, clinical audit reviews and updates on clinical pathways.

The practice also aims to build strong, collaborative working partnerships with other practices in Yate. It also wants to continue to work in collaboration with other health providers in the local area, particularly the community teams.

What we offer

The practice is open to a range of flexible working options and where possible will accommodate these.

Long opening hours also means more flexible start and finish times, while some of the team work on a term time only basis and requests are considered on a case-by-case basis.

Our family friendly benefits include a child care voucher scheme, unpaid leave for dependents and statutory maternity, paternity and adoption leave.

Learning and development

A desire to continue to develop underpins our staff training.

The practice is committed to developing future generations of doctors through its role as a teaching and training practice, and is actively exploring training physician’s associates.

All new members of staff have a formal induction process that takes place in the first two weeks and includes a range of mandatory online training. On the first day, there is an induction meeting with the practice manager to cover employment documentation, health and safety and a guided tour of the building.

The induction programme will include:

• Sitting in with a colleague to get an understanding of how the practice runs
• IT training with the IMT Manager and time to practice on our system using dummy patients
• Time with the referrals and admin team to gain an understanding of the admin processes of the practice
• Specific training sessions on aspects of the post

Clinical staff members have a GP mentor who offers regular, one-to-one sessions with them. The clinical pharmacist will have Dr Chris Jacobs as their mentor. Dr Jacobs is a teaching fellow at Bath University in primary care pharmacy.

Staff are encouraged to undertake formal training and CPD and clinical staff have one week (FTE) of study leave per annum with the practice supporting the cost of appropriate courses.

Our patients

Courtside’s semi-rural location fairly reflects the national average mix of age, sex and deprivation which offers a varied and interesting range of health problems to treat.

The practice consistently scores above the national and local average for patient satisfaction in the national patient survey, receiving on average less than 30 complaints per year.

The Patient Participation Group is also consulted with regularly to gauge feedback on services. A 2015 CQC inspection rated the surgery as “Good” and the team are working towards achieving “Outstanding” for the next inspection.