Mendip Vale Medical Practice

About the practice

Mendip Vale Medical practice is situated in a beautiful semi-rural location in North Somerset, just over 10 miles south west of the centre of Bristol.

Langford is one of four practices in the Mendip Vale group, which is also part of Woodspring – North Somerset.

The practice serves patients from five premises; modern state of the art surgeries in Langford and St Georges, long standing GP surgeries in Yatton and Congresbury and a limited GP clinic in Wrington. Patients can choose to be seen at any of the locations.

The practice offers a mix of same day and pre-bookable appointments, over 50% of patients use online access for booking appointments and ordering medication.

The team of ANPs undertake the majority of home visits, working with the Duty Doctor, Clinical Pharmacists and reception team.

The Langford site is an impressive modern facility, purpose-built in 2013, with great parking and equipment.

The group embraces innovation, and along with the multi-disciplinary team, looks for the most effective ways of working, for example, enabling ANPs to lead acute visiting as part of the dedicated on-call Duty team.

The nursing team also provides coil and implant fitting.

A practice car collects and returns patients for same day urgent appointments across the patch.

Working environment, values and culture

The team at Mendip Vale Langford set out to provide safe, high performing, effective, sustainable and innovative person-centred medical services. Supporting and encouraging each other to complete goals as a team, they also make Congresbury a great place to work, grow and develop.

The team endeavours to:

• Place patients at the heart of practice
• Have a can do attitude
• Be empowered to perform the role
• Use resources in the most appropriate way
• Take responsibility and accountability for all actions

The team find Mendip Vale a great place to work, and feel motivated, valued and engaged. There are good opportunities to progress in the group, for both clinicians and administrative staff.

The team enjoys organised summer and Christmas parties, provided by the practice, which enables teams to meet and enjoy themselves socially.

What we offer

The group offers a wide range of options for flexible working, looking how best to achieve a good work life balance for the team.

Being a larger organisation, the group is in a strong position to discover and implement the most effective and flexible way for our clinicians and administrators to work.

The group also has a BMA model contract for GPs, giving excellent maternity, paternity and sickness provision.

Mendip Vale runs a childcare voucher scheme.

Learning and development

Every member of the team is enthusiastic about teaching and training, undertaking both postgraduate and undergraduate teaching where appropriate.

Ensuring protected time for a monthly whole practice meeting offers the opportunity for training from guest speakers, presentations and meetings per specialty, i.e. GPs, Nurses, Admin, etc. Lunch is provided and an overview of developments and new opportunities discussed.

The large clinical team means the opportunity to share a wide range of in-house expertise ranging from dermatology to MSK, to sexual health and safe-guarding.

For clinicians, there is a week of study leave with funded courses via the Health Learning Partnership.

There are usually three or four trainee doctors attached to the practice at any one time while the group also offers Student Nurse placements.

All staff benefit from a comprehensive induction that includes opportunities for new starters to sit in on meetings, work alongside colleagues and get an insight into how the team operates. A buddy scheme is in place for clinicians to support them not only whilst ‘new’ but during their career at Mendip Vale.

Newly qualified staff are offered a Partner to act as mentor.

All staff are also offered funding support for further training and development to maximise their potential.

The practice also offers a development programme for GPs with Special Interest – GpwSI, developing a dermatology service, MSK and micro-suction service amongst others. The Practice has a sessionally-funded research team and a large Occupational Health provider arm.

Our patients

Practice patients cover a wide rural area which includes the villages of Blagdon, Churchill, Claverham, Cleeve, Congresbury, Hewish, Kenn, Kingston Seymour, Langford, St Georges, Wrington and Yatton.

In patient satisfaction surveys, the practice scored above both the North Somerset CCG and National average in 18 out of 23 areas.

The practice welcomes and uses feedback to improve ways of working. For example, by integrating the telephone system across the sites into two hubs, the practice has reduced average wait times to answering of less than 2 minutes, handling around 800 calls a day.