The Nourish App & Locum’s Nest partner to provide free mental health & wellbeing support to parents working in the NHS
As we mark the anniversary of one year of a global pandemic, many of us are reflecting on the challenges and hurdles we have faced individually and collectively over the last 12 months.
Being a first-time mum to a 6-month-old baby was already a minefield and as we both started to get into the swing of things, lockdown started. The months that followed were without a doubt the most challenging and isolating times of my life and, as a new mother, self-care and mindfulness just slipped out of my priorities and were left unnoticed for a while.
As my maternity leave came to an end and I started the process of emotionally, and physically, moving from the fog of motherhood to becoming a working parent, I came to the realisation that I needed to prioritise myself and my mental health and wellbeing in order to be present for my baby and for my life as it was evolving under the shadow of a pandemic.
With human contact as the freedom to meet friends and other parents becoming obsolete, working for a healthtech company I naturally looked to the digital realm to find a solution and an avenue for dealing with the stress and emotions of parenthood. The guilt of trying to find “me time” was, of course, always at the forefront of my mind - not to mention the logistics of actually finding those precious moments when I wasn’t at the beck and call of all the commitments around me. It was this necessity for short, effective and bite-sized moments of calm that attracted me to The Nourish app.
Part of the FemTech Lab accelerator programme, The Nourish App is a self-care toolkit and support team dedicated to parents. The app empowers them to look after their mental health and find moments of calm to rest, reset and restore, and navigate the stresses and strains of parenting in the modern world.
This wonderful app offers a myriad of ways to address and embrace self-care in ways that fit into our busy lives. The Nourish App has given me that opportunity to prioritise my mind, body and physical health. Having those few minutes to allow myself to de-stress and re-energise has made an immense difference in my thinking and outlook on parenting. I can tailor the app to suit me and, more importantly, I can feel in touch with so many people out there in a similar situation and read first-hand, honest experiences of parenthood.
Something the multidisciplinary parental wellbeing experts at The Nourish App has truly understood as you scroll through the content they created on the app. As they perfectly described, many of the mental health and wellness initiatives conceived at a high-level are unappealing or impractical for any working parent, let alone parents who are also critical workers. The Nourish team has curated a self-care app, tailored to the specific needs of busy parents, providing a range of practical wellbeing content from mindfulness, yoga Nidra, breathing exercises and positive psychology. It’s amazing to be able to navigate the app based on how I am feeling at a specific moment and the list is quite exhaustive from exhausted to overwhelmed, frazzled, stressed, angry, unable to cope; or even by common parenting challenges such as sleep deprivation.
Sara Campin, founder of The Nourish App and former life-sciences strategy consultant, created Nourish out of frustration that mindfulness apps didn’t meet the specific needs and challenges of parents. She explains,
“When we don’t give ourselves time to switch off from doing, thinking, analysing and supporting others, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed and burned out. We like to use the example of thinking of our stress levels like a pot of water on a hot stove. When we are parents or critical workers, the stove is always on and the water is heating up. The more triggers we have during the day, the more the water will heat up until it boils over and we erupt. By taking mindful pauses, or just reconnecting with yourself, helps us to take the pan off the heat and stop the water from boiling over.”
Having found such a gem of help and care, I brought the app to my colleagues at Locum’s Nest and we are proud to have partnered with the amazing team at The Nourish App to offer free premium access to all our users on the Locum’s Nest platform.
Our Co-Founder, Dr Nicholas Andreou, shared, “We believe that more needs to be done to support NHS workers to cope with the stresses and strains of their jobs. At Locum’s Nest, we provide solutions to ensure that staff can work flexibly and stay in the jobs that they love and we see offering mental health and wellness support that is both very tailored to specific needs as well as being completely scalable, like the Nourish app, a great opportunity to have a big impact on those people working in the health sector and consequently, the level of care that is delivered. When people take care of themselves, they are better able to take care of others.”
Nourish offers working parents focussed, short and manageable ways of looking after their physical, emotional and mental health and we want to bring that message to our valued users.
Sara Campin further explains,
“We felt that it was important to do what we could to support people who are completely stretched from caring for others, to consider how to take care of themselves too. So we are delighted to partner with Locum’s Nest, a trusted partner to hundreds of hospitals and thousands of health workers, to reach out to these incredible and inspiring parents.”
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You can find out more about free premium access to The Nourish App here.
If you’re an NHS workers and want to share ideas about how we can better help support your mental health and wellbeing, please get in touch with me at maryam@locumsnest.co.uk