About University Hospitals Tees (UHT)

About UHT

University Hospitals Tees (UHT) was formed in 2024 when North Tees and Hartlepool NHS Foundation Trust and South Tees Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust came together to operate under a group model with shared governance and leadership arrangements across the two trusts.

UHT is the largest health and care employer in the Tees Valley and surrounding areas, with 16,000 staff and a budget of around £1.4billion.

The group has:

Four main hospital sites:

Friarage Hospital
The James Cook University Hospital
University Hospital of North Tees
University Hospital of Hartlepool

Six main community sites:

Redcar Primary Care Hospital
Guisborough Primary Care Hospital
Peterlee Community Hospital
East Cleveland Primary Care Hospital (in Brotton)
Tees Valley Community Diagnostic Centre (in Stockton)
Friary Community Hospital (in Richmond)

Plus lots of community locations supporting delivery of local healthcare services to help us provide the best possible care to the people in our areas.

Our population

University Hospitals Tees serves a local population of around 700,000 people who live and work in the Tees Valley (Hartlepool, Stockton-on-Tees, Middlesbrough, Redcar and Cleveland, and Darlington) and in parts of North Yorkshire and County Durham.

For some of our more specialist services, for example in cancer, specialist rehabilitation and vascular surgery, we serve a much wider population of around 1.85 million people, reaching from the Scottish Borders into Yorkshire.

Caring better together

By working together University Hospitals Tees aims to 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 major health issues and having a coherent voice to represent the people of the Tees Valley and parts of County Durham and North Yorkshire.

The group model 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. It is hoped that by working together we 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.

Working in partnership

We work with two Integrated Care Boards (ICBs) as commissioners of our services – North East and North Cumbria ICB (for our population in Tees Valley and areas of County Durham), and Humber and North Yorkshire ICB (for our population in Hambleton and Richmondshire.

As a major public sector employer, we have a significant role as an anchor institution, working alongside partners and beyond our role as a healthcare provider to enable sustainable, prosperous, and healthy communities.

Care closer to home

We are an integrated provider of acute and community healthcare. While there are obviously circumstances when people need to be in a hospital setting, it is also important that our population is able to access healthcare close to home where that is appropriate. This may be delivered in a range of community facilities or in patients’ own homes.