In this section
About Us
Manchester Local Care Organisation is a pioneering public sector organisation that provides your NHS community health services and adult social care services in Manchester. Part NHS and part local authority, we work as one team across traditional organisational boundaries to achieve this.
Around 4,000 staff that make up the city’s adult and children’s NHS community teams and adult social care teams are deployed to MLCO from Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust (MFT) and Manchester City Council (MCC). They include district and community nurses, social workers, health visitors, therapists, care staff, support staff and many other health and care professionals.
These teams are working together as part of one single organisation so that care is better coordinated around your needs. This includes the development of a range of new ways of integrated working in the community. There are plans to deploy further teams to MLCO over the coming years.
Formed on 1 April 2018, we are a public sector partnership organisation powered by Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust, Greater Manchester Mental Health, Manchester City Council, Greater Manchester Integrated Care Partnership and the Manchester Primary Care Partnership.
What we are doing – our mission
In simple terms, there are two main things that MLCO has been set up to do:
- Make a positive contribution to help people in Manchester live longer and enjoy better health than many do now
- To improve community and neighbourhood care for people in the city.
So whilst we manage your community health and care services, we are here to do much more that by ensuring that we work in new ways and do things differently in the city.
Working with Trafford Local Care Organisation
Manchester Local Care Organisation works closely with our sister organisation Trafford Local Care Organisation (TLCO).
TLCO provides the community health and adult social care services across the neighbouring borough of Trafford and was formed in October 2019. Although MLCO and TLCO are separate organisations, we share an executive team across the two organisations. Many of our frontline teams also work closely together through our new clinical strucutre (see below) and are increasingly looking at sharing best practice in delivering community health and adult social care services.
Changes to our structure (October 2025)
On the health side of MLCO there have been some changes to how we are organised. MLCO is part of the Manchester and Trafford Local Care Organisations and University Dental Hospital of Manchester Clinical Group of Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust.
During the summer of 2025 we consulted with staff on a new clinical structure to better organise our NHS community healthcare services across MLCO, TLCO and the dental hospital. That has led to a new clinical structure which launched in October 2025 which organises our services into one clinical group, four care divisions and 13 care services.
Our care divisions see our adult and neighbourhood services, children’s community services and urgent care and specialist services managed in a new way across Manchester and Trafford. These changes do not impact on our adult social care services which continue to work alongside community health.
- View our new structure across our health services here [PDF 3.2MB]. Please note that we are recruiting to several posts and this chart will be updated monthly.