About our hospital group

North Tees and Hartlepool NHS Foundation Trust and South Tees Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust have formally agreed to form a group to enable closer working across the two organisations.

This exciting development has come about following years of joint working but is now well underway following the recruitment of the group’s chief executive, Stacey Hunter.

The group model means that the two organisations remain separate so they can represent their communities really effectively, but it has the flexibility to enable the trusts to work at scale to take strategic decisions which benefit the group as a whole and the patients we serve.

The two trusts are the area’s largest employers, with a budget of around £1.2billion and more than 15,000 staff who deliver acute, tertiary and community health and care services across the Tees Valley, North Yorkshire, County Durham and beyond.

Better outcomes for staff and patients

The group will be known as University Hospitals Tees and will deliver better outcomes for:

Patients – by ensuring equal access to treatment and sharing best practice on how to deliver care.
Staff – by enabling them to work on all of the group’s sites more easily and develop career opportunities.
The wider population – by collaborating to work on endemic health issues and having a coherent voice to represent the people of the Tees Valley and parts of County Durham and North Yorkshire.

This is complex programme of change which will involve working with a wide variety of partners. These include: local authorities, Healthwatch, patient involvement leads, other NHS trusts, primary care organisations and third sector organisations, as well as influencing regionally through the Integrated Care System for North East and North Cumbria.

The two Teesside-based trusts announced their group ambitions in January 2023, after securing the permanent appointment of a joint chair, Professor Derek Bell OBE, in September 2021. The formal partnership agreement was signed in February 2024.

It is hoped that by working together the two trusts will be better placed to bid for national funding for the area and better able to retain and attract specialist doctors and nurses in hard-to-recruit areas.