A University of Bath psychologist is set to develop an app to help support mothers’ mental health, after winning a major prize.
HearHer, designed by clinical and health psychologist Dr Faith Martin, is one of the winners of the inaugural Ripple Women’s Digital Health Challenge, announced today.
HearHer will target maternal mental wellbeing for the over 2 million mothers in the UK supporting children with mental health or developmental challenges. This group is known to experience chronic stress and emotional exhaustion whilst supporting their children, with services that can be difficult to access and without systematic provision for support for mothers' wellbeing.
A Senior Lecturer in Bath’s Department of Psychology, Dr Faith Martin said: "Mothers supporting children with mental health or developmental challenges are often coping at home, waiting for Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAHMS) support, or managing their child's distress between appointments and trying to keep everything else going.
“HearHer is designed to provide evidence-based, personalised psychological support during those critical gaps, helping mothers to sustain their own wellbeing while they care for their children.”
The app is one of two winners of the Challenge, which is delivered by Cogniss in partnership with the Health Innovation Network and Amazon Web Services (AWS). The Challenge supports experts to build adoption-ready solutions that address urgent priorities in the Women’s Health Strategy for England and the NHS shift towards earlier intervention, prevention, and equitable access to care.
HearHer will be developed on the Cogniss no-code digital health platform. The Health Innovation Network will then support the journey beyond development, including identification of pilot sites, study design, evidence generation, economic evaluation, and adoption into NHS pathways.
Women’s Health Minister Baroness Merron said: “Closing these gaps in women's health is key. It is unacceptable that so many women are waiting too long for the care they need, and we are changing this through renewing the Women’s Health Strategy.
“What is so encouraging about the winning solutions is that they bring frontline clinical insight, lived experience and academic rigour together to address real, persistent gaps in care through digital solutions. I am excited to see these solutions coming to life and reaching women that need them.”
Leon Young, CEO, Cogniss, said: “There were too many exceptional submissions for this Challenge, all doable and all tackling urgent gaps in women’s health. Through Ripple, we are building a publishing and delivery infrastructure that will enable more innovators to focus on patients and outcomes, while we and our partners support the pathway into everyday NHS care.”
Professor Ben Bridgewater, Chair of the Health Innovation Network, said: “Women’s health is a national priority, and these winning solutions demonstrate exactly the kind of practical, clinically grounded innovation the NHS needs. Ripple now gives us a model we can expand to support many more innovators and accelerate the delivery of high-impact patient solutions across the NHS."
The other winning project, NVP Minds, is led by the University of Oxford’s Associate Professor Fiona Challacombe and aims to support women experiencing Hyperemesis Gravidarum, a debilitating condition that causes sever nausea and vomiting in pregnancy.