North Tees and Hartlepool NHS Foundation Trust: The Complete Guide

The trust and its hospital sites

North Tees and Hartlepool NHS Foundation Trust is the main acute and community NHS provider for Hartlepool, Stockton-on-Tees and parts of east County Durham, serving a population of around 400,000. It was formed by a 1999 merger of the area's separate acute providers and achieved NHS Foundation Trust status in December 2007 — so, unlike some trusts on this site that merged relatively recently, its current two-site structure has been stable for over two decades.

The trust employs close to 5,500 medical, nursing, clinical and non-clinical staff, on an annual turnover in the region of £275 million, and runs a broad general acute service line — cardiology, vascular surgery, stroke, neurorehabilitation, orthopaedics, urology, gastroenterology, obstetrics and gynaecology, respiratory medicine, critical care and neonatal care among others — alongside bowel and breast cancer screening programmes and community dental services.

'University Hospitals Tees': group, not merger

If you've seen "University Hospitals Tees" in a job advert or on social media and assumed it's a new, separate employer, it's worth clearing this up before you apply. In May 2024, North Tees and Hartlepool NHS Foundation Trust and South Tees Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (which runs The James Cook University Hospital in Middlesbrough) announced they would operate under a shared group identity, University Hospitals Tees — the North East's first hospital group of this kind. Both trusts' own leadership have been explicit and consistent on the point: this is a collaboration intended to widen career opportunities, strengthen bids for national funding, and present a unified voice for the Tees Valley region — not a merger. Each organisation remains its own statutory NHS foundation trust with its own board.

For anyone applying for a job, the practical takeaway is straightforward: your contract, HR policies, continuous service and redundancy calculations sit with the specific trust named on your offer letter — North Tees and Hartlepool NHS Foundation Trust, in this case — not with "University Hospitals Tees" as a legal entity, because it isn't one. The group branding may, in practice, translate into more visible cross-trust rotation and secondment opportunities with South Tees over time, which is worth asking about directly if career mobility across the Tees Valley matters to you.

What makes the trust distinctive

Beyond the general district-hospital range you'd expect at a two-site acute trust of this size, a handful of specific services are worth knowing about:

• A genuinely broad cardiovascular and neuroscience offer for a trust of this size. The trust runs vascular surgery, cardiology, cardiothoracic surgery and cardiac critical care alongside neurology, stroke, neurorehabilitation and spinal services — a wider specialist spread than a typical district general trust of comparable staff numbers, though for the most complex tertiary neurosurgery and cardiac surgery cases, patients are still referred on to larger regional centres.
• A dedicated community stroke team. The trust runs a specific community stroke service supporting rehabilitation after discharge, rather than leaving stroke recovery entirely to generic community nursing — a genuinely specific service line worth knowing about if stroke or neurorehabilitation nursing is your area.
• Regional cancer screening. The trust delivers bowel and breast cancer screening programmes across its wider catchment, alongside its core acute workload.
• Two-site working, not one. Running two separate acute sites (North Tees and Hartlepool) rather than one large single campus is a genuine structural feature of working here — it can mean more day-to-day autonomy and a smaller-hospital feel at the Hartlepool site specifically, but also means some services and on-call rotas span both sites, which is worth asking about at interview for any specific role.

The ageing estate and the new hospital campaign

This is a genuinely distinctive, well-documented story about the trust that's worth knowing before you apply, and we want to be precise rather than alarmist about it. University Hospital of North Tees is a long-standing acute hospital that regional reporting has repeatedly described as nearing the end of its practical working life — one widely cited 2023 assessment gave the existing estate around eight years of remaining life at that time. A fully worked-up plan for a brand new hospital, originally proposed for a site at Wynyard under a scheme called "Momentum: Pathways to Healthcare", was well advanced around 2010 before a change of government put the funding decision on hold indefinitely.

Since then, the case for a replacement has continued to be pressed publicly — including by the Tees Valley region's directly elected mayor, who has repeatedly lobbied central government, and interest in including a rebuild within the national New Hospital Programme. As of the most recent reporting we could verify (September 2026), no confirmed funding commitment or firm build timeline had been announced. If a "new hospital" appears in any recruitment messaging or informal conversation during your application process, it's worth asking specifically whether that refers to a confirmed, funded scheme or to this longer-running campaign — the two are not the same thing, and conflating them would give you a misleading picture of what to expect in your first several years in post.

CQC rating: an honest read

North Tees and Hartlepool's most recent comprehensive CQC inspection resulted in an overall rating of Requires improvement, with a report published in September 2022 — including a Requires improvement rating for the well-led question specifically. Around the same period, a specific inspection of maternity services also found Requires improvement, having previously been rated more highly, while children and young people's services held a Good rating. We're reporting this plainly because it's the honest, current official verdict, not because we want to overstate the trust's difficulties — a Requires improvement rating reflects specific, documented areas the CQC wants to see addressed, not a trust in crisis, and it sits alongside the genuinely above-average staff survey results covered next.

The 2024 NHS Staff Survey

2,337 staff completed the 2024 NHS Staff Survey, a 45% response rate — below the 49% median across the trust's benchmarking group of 122 acute and acute-and-community trusts nationally. A below-average response rate is worth flagging honestly, since it means the results reflect a somewhat smaller slice of the workforce than at some comparable trusts. That said, the actual scores from those who did respond paint a genuinely more positive picture than the response rate alone might suggest:

Scores run 0-10, higher is more positive. Eight of the nine themes came in above the benchmark-group average, including compassionate and inclusive culture (7.36 vs 7.21) and staff engagement (6.89 vs 6.84). The one exception was "we are always learning" — covering development opportunities and appraisals — at 5.47 against a 5.64 average, a specific, identifiable area of relative weakness rather than a trust-wide problem. If career development and access to training matter a lot to you, that's a fair, specific question to raise at interview.

Pay and HCAS at North Tees and Hartlepool

Every Agenda for Change band here matches the national scale exactly — see our 2026/27 pay scales guide. High Cost Area Supplement (HCAS) exists specifically to offset the unusually high cost of living in and immediately around London, defined by postcode-area zones (inner, outer, and a fringe ring across parts of Surrey, Hertfordshire, Essex, Kent and Berkshire near the London border) — not by a trust's size or region. Stockton-on-Tees and Hartlepool sit nowhere near that geography, so pay here is the standard national Agenda for Change rate, identical band-for-band to any other non-HCAS trust. Doctors and dentists sit outside Agenda for Change entirely, on their own national contract, unaffected by location either way.

North Tees and Hartlepool NHS Foundation Trust, not the NHS as a single organisation and not "University Hospitals Tees", is your legal employer if you work here — relevant for continuous service and, where applicable, redundancy pay calculations. As a broad acute and community trust it recruits across the usual range of roles — nursing, medicine, midwifery, allied health professions, pharmacy, healthcare science, and the healthcare assistant, administrative and estates staff needed to run two acute sites and community services. Our nursing and medicine guides cover how pay progresses band by band.

North Tees vs Gateshead: how the scale compares

North Tees and Hartlepool is best compared against another mid-sized North East England acute trust rather than one of the much larger regional teaching giants. Gateshead Health NHS Foundation Trust — also covered in depth on this site — is a fair, direct comparator: similar overall staff numbers, no HCAS, and a genuinely different current CQC and staff survey engagement picture worth setting side by side.

The headline: both are genuinely mid-sized North East trusts on the same national pay terms with no HCAS uplift, but they currently sit at different points on CQC's rating scale, and Gateshead's 2024 staff survey response rate and consistency across all nine themes is the stronger of the two on the numbers. North Tees and Hartlepool's actual theme scores are still mostly above benchmark despite the lower response rate, and it runs a broader cardiovascular and neuroscience service line across two sites rather than one. Neither is objectively "better" purely from these figures — the right fit depends on specialty, site, and what you find when you ask current staff about the department you'd actually be joining.

Careers and training

Running two acute sites gives staff at North Tees and Hartlepool a genuinely wider spread of clinical environments to rotate through than a single-site trust of similar overall size, without needing to relocate away from the Tees Valley — useful if you want variety without a long-distance move. The trust's participation in the wider University Hospitals Tees group with South Tees may, over time, translate into more visible cross-trust secondment and rotation opportunities across the Tees Valley more broadly, though as covered above this is a collaboration between two separate employers rather than one unified organisation, so any such moves would still involve a change of legal employer.

As with any trust, the specific department and team you join will shape your actual day-to-day experience far more than trust-wide statistics — particularly given the mixed CQC and staff survey picture covered above, it's worth asking current or recent staff directly about the specific service and site you'd be working at, rather than relying on trust-wide figures alone.

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