North Tees and Hartlepool NHS Foundation Trust and South Tees Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust formed a group to enable closer working across the two organisations in January 2024.

The Group is the area’s largest employers, with a budget of around £1.2 billion 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.

The group will deliver better outcomes for:

• Our patients, by ensuring equal access to treatment and sharing best practice on how to deliver care.
• Our staff, by enabling them to work on all of the group’s sites more easily and develop career opportunities.
• The wider population we serve, 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.

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.

This is a huge and complex programme of change. To achieve our aims we will be working with a wide variety of partners such as local authorities, Healthwatch, patient involvement leads, other NHS trusts and primary care organisations and third sector organisations as well as influencing regionally through the Integrated Care System for North East and North Cumbria.

To help us deliver on our ambition we have a vacancy on the Group Board for a Non-Executive Director. They will provide constructive challenge, independence of thought, support diverse insight and strategic input, and ensure that we have robust systems of risk management and governance in place. Beyond this, they will need to demonstrate a strong alignment to our core values and direct experience of promoting and enabling diversity of thought and delivery.  Specifically they will have relevant finance experience in a large and complex organisation with recognised financial qualifications

We are committed to increasing the diversity of our existing Board, and positively improve the representation of people from ethnic minority groups. We are seeking applications from people who are passionate about high quality healthcare and delivering outstanding services across the system and whose background, experience and identity will broaden and enhance the breadth of our leadership perspective and style in navigating both current and future challenges.

Application by CV to Jackie White, Group Company Secretary by emailing jackie.white@nhs.net