Who We Are

Stoke on Trent Community Health Service is the main provider of a range of diverse health services available in the local community

Stoke on Trent Community Health Services (CHS) has responsibility for delivering a range of health services throughout the community and in a variety of settings including local hospitals, health centres, the walk-in-centre, schools, residential homes and in people’s own homes as appropriate. We have a prime responsibility for contributing to the overall NHS agenda. Two key examples are:

1. Responding to patient choice agenda

2. Working closely with commissioners of local health services and especially practice based commissioners

We serve a local population of over 270,000 people and employ over 1500 staff who work primarily either in our hospitals or healthcare facilities based throughout the community, or with patients in their own homes or other community settings.

The health of people in Stoke is determined by a range of factors – such as having a safe and healthy place to live, being able to enjoy and achieve at school and having a fairly paid job. Like residents of many industrial cities, the people of Stoke on Trent have a poorer standard of health on average than the country as a whole. Within the city there are also extreme inequalities, with up to an 8-year difference in life expectancy between those that live in different parts of the City. Our primary aim must therefore be to improve the overall level of health for the city whilst reducing the inequalities between our most affluent and deprived areas. This will need sustained and targeted action, working alongside local residents to ensure that the solutions we develop are appropriate, effective and sustainable, particularly in our priority neighbourhoods where people’s life chances are less good.

We still have to ensure that people can get the GP and hospital services they need quickly when they need them, but increasingly we have to pay attention to initiatives that will improve general health. This means that we must keep a focus on issues such as support to children and their parents in early life, helping people to give up smoking, supporting people with long term conditions to manage exacerbations and to live in a sustainable way in the community, keeping well and combating isolation in older age. In all that we do we must listen to local people and clinical staff so that we are in touch with local people’s wishes and experience of using the NHS.

We operate from two community hospitals, the Haywood Hospital and Longton Cottage Hospital, and from Health Centres across Stoke on Trent and North Staffordshire.

Our Aim is:

To deliver high quality, safe services and promote the health and well-being of everyone we serve.

Our Vision is:

To offer hospital and community services that people value and positively choose to receive.

Our Values are:

• People are at the centre of everything we do
• We take pride in the services that we provide and in delivering a high standard of care
• We enable people to make choices about their care by providing understandable high quality information
• We treat each other and people who receive our services with dignity and respect
• We all act with responsibility for what we do

Our Objectives are:

• To ensure people are at the centre of what we do
• To sustain and expand quality services that make a real difference
• To develop partnerships with purpose
• To develop and empower staff
• To make a real difference – meeting standards for best practice and delivering targets
• Ensuring public money is well spent

We hope this website will provide residents with useful information about the range of services and treatments Stoke on Trent Community Health Service provides.