Falkland Surgery

The Falkland Surgery is located on the southern edge of Newbury, a town which is now the centre of a thriving hi-tech economy, while retaining many of the attractions of the original market town.

Our Practice area covers all of Newbury town and much of the rural and village community to the south of Newbury. Newbury has excellent road and rail links to the rest of the country with an excellent rail service to London. More locally we have a small rural theatre and a town Arts Centre with a varied programme, which is augmented in May by the well-respected Newbury Spring Festival.

We moved into The Falkland Surgery on 5th July 2002 and continue to be thrilled with our purpose built, state of the art premises. We were previously known as St. John’s Rd Surgery and one of the main drivers for relocation was the need for space to become a training practice. There are currently 1 full-time partner, and 6 part-time partners (and two salaried GPs) plus trainees.

We have a wide variety of expertise within the practice with partners having well established interests in Palliative Care and Diabetes.

The list size is 14.500 and we have a higher than average elderly population. We also look after a local boarding school.

Our new building has been designed to retain the best features of the old with an emphasis on welcoming patients as well as providing an excellent environment for staff. There is a dedicated trainee room, which is next door to the trainer.

We have a library, which also has a large “boardroom” style table around which all the GPs work, during times of the day when we are not seeing patients. It is difficult to describe to those who have not worked here, but the existence of this room, (which was a key feature carried over from St. John’s Rd Surgery), enables us to communicate on an informal basis several times a day, as well as to regularly seek advice and share experiences.

We have been reviewing adverse events around this table for many years, long before clinical governance gave it a name! The library has electronic access to journals as well as back copies of the BMJ and BJGP for those who prefer the feel of paper. Books are bought from a budget, and staff at the primary health care team meetings can all make recommendations for these.

We are fully equipped with video, ECG and spirometer which link straight into the computer, defibrillator, nebulisers, “sonicaids”, etc and we have a minor ops room, which is used for a range of minor surgical procedures.

The practice is highly computerised (EMISWEB) and has the major advantage of having a partner who is especially keen on IM&T and general practice computing in particular. We have been “paper-frugal” for 15 years and banished the paper notes upstairs when we moved. All staff have access to the practice intranet and to the internet / NHSnet via their PCs and we print patient information leaflets in our consulting rooms.

Visiting consultants from Reading and Oxford come to West Berkshire Community Hospital and the opportunities for seeking informal advice enhance our relationships with these consultants. It is also easy to arrange for registrars to observe clinics and minor ops sessions if required.

All Out of Hours care is transferred to Westcall OOH service. The JCPT requirements for OOH experience are fulfilled by arranging for the registrar to observe and then work alongside experienced GPs from other practices. A full time registrar will need to do 12 sessions in 1 year to fulfil the requirements.

We have all the staff you might expect with an active Primary Health Care Team meeting regularly. We also have an Elderly Care co-ordinator and a mental health link worker and counsellor working in the practice. The Citizens Advice Bureau run a service based in the Surgery giving easy access to our patients for advice on social and legal problems. We encourage all staff to take on new responsibilities and have several specialist nurse-run clinics for chronic diseases.

Several of our attached staff are teachers as well, and we have a steady stream of student nurses, midwives and health visitors as well as medical students. So we have lots of people very keen to help you develop into whatever sort of a good GP you wish to end up as.

We currently have one trainer in the practice, Tim Walter

Tim Walter was approved for training in 2007 having obtained the Certificate of Medical Education with the Oxford Deanery, and has had a variety of trainees since then. He has also been involved in the first wave of GP Nurse training on the Pilot scheme and was on the GPN steering committee. He has co-authored a series of DVDs looking at patient experiences in medicine based on the healthtalkonline.org Dipex database.

We all enjoy general practice (most of the time) and hope to be able to offer you some of the experiences that make it such a rewarding career.

Please contact Tim Walter (GP) or Emma Macpherson (practice manager) if you have any queries or would like to arrange a visit.

“I thoroughly enjoyed my time with the doctors and other staff.”

“I enjoyed time to fulfil other agendas eg visit palliative care team”

“Joint surgeries with all partners were useful and constructive”