Sonning Common Health Centre Website
We provide a great training environment, following a traditional General Practice model, and want you to leave your time with us, loving being a GP.
We have 10,000 patients and are a single site practice, covering a large patch from Nettlebed to Henley to Caversham, giving us a great mix of rural patients and suburban. Our population has a large elderly component meaning you become very used to managing complex multimorbidity and we do our own visits giving you invaluable experience in preparing you for independent practice. We won’t dump a nursing home on you, but you will do a rotation looking after the 70 bed Abbeycrest nursing home, going with the regular GP on their weekly visit to ensure you get this experience in a supported environment. We encourage a list system for routine care to get continuity, and you will have the opportunity to adopt your own patients to get this follow up, but duty doctor is done as a practice, which you will build up to, to ensure you get adequate exposure to acute and urgent care.
Morning coffee meeting is compulsory (although tea is acceptable!) and we do a daily health walk before lunch to get us up and out in all but the worst weather. We believe that good pastoral care for our team means we don’t just aim to survive – but want you to thrive with us. You’ll only be able to give great, safe care for your patients, if we can give you a great, safe environment to perform at your best in.
Training is built into our ethos, SCHC being one of the founders of GP training, is passionate and committed to GP training. We have a range of trainers, some newer and full of enthusiasm, and some with of over 25 years experience and still full of enthusiasm, all with different passions and interests including; experts in WPBA, ARCPs, joint injections and minor surgery, Quality improvement, innovative problem solving, women’s health, mental health, PLAB………so although you will be allocated to one trainer, we try to all provide training input to give you diversity, and so we can triangulate assessments etc. In addition the whole practice team are involved in your training, so you can observe different styles, and get feedback from many different sources, to help you hone and develop your own style as a confident consulter.
Post exam ST3 trainees are encouraged to broaden their exposure to areas of interest, in preparation for life post-CCT. Whether that be women’s health qualifications, develop joint injections as a specialist skill, get involved in improvement projects or get exposure to wider GP politics.
We’re justifiably proud of the experience we give, and the feedback we get from previous registrars… and we look forward to you joining the team.