Teesside NHS faces huge financial pressures, bosses warned

Stacey Hunter, chief executive of the University Hospitals Tees (UHT) group, which covers both North and South Tees NHS Foundation Trusts, said they had to work in a different way to live within their means as the government expects.

She said: “We do know because of the level of savings required, which is well publicised right across the NHS… we have to genuinely transform some things.”

The group’s new 15-year strategy says it needs to “work smarter” and deliver the best value for money in an underfunded system by “slimming down back office services and focusing our funding on those services which have the greatest impact for our population”.

It plans to move “from treatment to prevention, from hospital to community, from analogue to digital”, following government announcements to slash running costs and workforces in regional and national health bodies.

In the next year the group plans to expand community services to 500 “hospital at home” beds, deliver more procedures in hubs in Hartlepool and Northallerton to lower waiting lists and free up space in Stockton and Middlesbrough.

It aims to join up teams from the two trusts and transform services in the coming months and years, and from 2030, move towards having one “acute specialist hospital” and one “acute general hospital” each focusing on key specialisms while both James Cook and North Tees hospitals continue to run emergency departments.

Ms Hunter said they needed the right methods and resources to make “big transformational change”.

She said: “The financial asks of us, alongside the absolute necessity to run safe and sustainable clinical services, are enormous in this next three years.”

She said they had to “pick up pace” and “articulate the high-level direction of travel”, and had spent a long time working out what they wanted to do for the people of Teesside.

She added: “For me the plan has to reflect that.

“It is our frontline teams and clinical leaders that have to help us bring this to life. We’ve got to give our colleagues the support they need to be able to make some really significant transformations.”

The UHT group’s performance report for October 2025 refers to focusing on “whole-time equivalent reduction, e.g. non-essential bank and agency work, scrutiny of recruitment requests”.

Ms Hunter said this reduction would be “absolutely pivotal and fundamental in these next three years” because of the proportion of money spent on staff.

She said: “For all the understandable reasons, this is the bit we find the hardest. There’s a disconnect sometimes in terms of the realities and how it feels because of the day-to-day demand. It’s why just the ‘business as usual’ parts of our plan won’t get us to where we need to be.

“That transformational element of things, and really changing the way we work, stopping doing some of the things that actually we’re not necessarily commissioned to do etc etc, are all going to have to be absolute priorities for us as we work over this next three-year period.

“We rightly point to our demand increases, the level of pressures our frontline colleagues are under. That of course is true.”

She said with government requirements to “live within our means” they need to transform in a way “that allows us to start to reduce some of our reliance on the number of people we’ve got”.

She added: “We’ve seen a significant growth in that number of people in this last five, six-year period. I don’t have an easy solution to that.

“It will be one of the more difficult conundrums we’ve got to focus on. It’s a challenging message for both some of our public who will come in and sometimes experience how busy it feels for some of our colleagues, and challenging for our colleagues.”

Matt Neligan, the group’s chief executive and chief strategy officer, said they were finalising plans for the next five years, adding: “We’re at a significant pivot point.”

He spoke of 10 clinical service units (CSUs) which will pull together the “transformation of clinical services”, with a strategic partner appointed to streamline things over a 15-month period.

He said: “That’s a really important change for us in terms of how we run our services. It will involve a sharpening up and focusing that will really help to accelerate and deliver progress.”

He said they wanted the public, patients and partners to contribute to their ideas and ambitions, with events and, for some changes to services, formal consultation.

More detail will come on “what does it look like for patients, for the changes in the way in which services are going to be delivered and where”.

Business cases will be drawn up for various areas of services. Non-executive director Alison Wilson asked how it related to other plans, saying: “We know we’ve got such a challenging time ahead. We need to motor on some of those things quickly.”

Mr Neligan said: “There’s a set of national planning asks of the NHS that are must dos, and we have to deliver that. The way in which we get there is through the implementation of our strategy.”