156 care employers in Cheshire West and Chester could find you

Working in care in Cheshire West and Chester

Chester, the Port and the salt towns: where are the care jobs?

This borough joins very different places. Chester is a walled cathedral city with a large share of local care employers. Ellesmere Port, up on the Wirral side of the Mersey estuary, is an industrial town with its own busy cluster. Northwich and Winsford, the old salt towns of mid Cheshire, make up the third main area, and between them all lie farming villages and small towns such as Frodsham, Tarporley and Malpas. Home care agencies are about half of the local employers, and there are more nursing homes than residential care homes.

The population grew by over 8% in the ten years to 2021, to around 357,000, faster than the North West and England. It is also older than average, with a median age of 43, and about 9,200 more people were in their fifties or early sixties than ten years earlier. Those are the people likely to need support at home over the coming years.

Cheshire West and Chester Council offers direct payments in place of council arranged services, and its guidance stresses that this means choosing who helps you and when. It has a page for people employing a personal assistant, encouraging them to invest in their PA's training and pointing them to a direct payment support service that helps with recruiting and managing staff.

On the NHS side, the Countess of Chester Hospital NHS Foundation Trust runs the Countess of Chester and Ellesmere Port Hospital, while Mid Cheshire Hospitals runs the Victoria Infirmary in Northwich and Elmhurst Intermediate Care Centre in Winsford. Cheshire College South and West has campuses in Chester and Ellesmere Port and runs care courses at every stage from Level 1 to Level 3.

81% of the inspected care employers in Cheshire West and Chester are rated Good or Outstanding by the CQC, below the 84% across the North West and below England as a whole (85%).