A new Pregnancy Pain smartphone app for patients and web portal for clinicians has launched to help encourage increased awareness and self-management of pregnancy-related back pain and pelvic girdle pain, helping to reduce the extent of longer-term problems for patients. The product is free to NHS clinics.
Living With Pregnancy Pain (LWPP) aims to fill a gap in the current care pathway, so that women not yet requiring referral for physiotherapy treatment can be given access to the app which supports better self-management of early symptoms. This attempts to reduce the likelihood of the condition deteriorating, saving the need for face to face appointments and reducing costs
Award winning digital health company, Living With, owner of the market leading pelvic floor exercise app, Squeezy, has been working with NHS physiotherapist Maria Moffatt to develop the product, which is built on top of the Living With condition management platform.
Maria Moffatt asked Living With to collaborate with her and said; ”Pregnancy-related back pain and pelvic girdle pain are common problems experienced during pregnancy, with up to 70% of pregnant women affected. As a clinician and PhD student, my interest is in helping to promote the self-management of these conditions where possible, but also in educating pregnant women on the treatment options available if self-management is not feasible. Previous research literature and interviews undertaken with patients in the early stages of my research, revealed that pregnant women often feel that there is a lack of high-quality information available and express a need for more readily available advice on how to manage their condition.”
The launch version of Living With Pregnancy Pain has been designed to address these issues. It enables clinicians to distribute a free LWPP app to their patients and monitor their patients’ symptoms remotely at any time. Patients are able to understand their symptoms better, do the correct exercises, set goals, report pain and sleep issues and track clinically validated Pelvic Girdle Pain (PGP) outcome measures.
It provides a convenient and comprehensive information resource for pregnant women with pregnancy-related back pain and pelvic girdle pain. The new app forms part of an ongoing research project, which will help Living With to understand how well it achieves these aims and how it could be developed further. NHS clinics can benefit by using the app with their patients for free;
Chris Robson, CEO of Living With, commented “We have decided to provide this as a free app for NHS clinics to enable them to give a hugely valuable resource to the many women who suffer unnecessarily from these conditions. We hope that the research that Maria is doing with Manchester Metropolitan University will show substantial value has been created. Personally, it’s great to see the launch of another “pelvic health” product, building on the digital health expertise and reputation that we have already established with Squeezy and with Living With Pelvic Health, which is now live in 15 NHS Trusts and is proven to improve patient adherence and outcomes.”
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Press contact:
Chris Robson
chris.robson@livingwith.health
07990 978 423
About Living With
Living With is an award-winning digital health company and developers of the top paid medical app in the UK, Squeezy. The Living With condition management platform enables clinicians to connect to their patients and monitor their conditions remotely while saving costs and improving outcomes.
The Living With platform currently has five live products; Squeezy, the UK’s top paid medical app; Living With Pelvic Health, Living With Rheumatoid Arthritis, Living With Pregnancy Pain and Living With Oesophageal Cancer. The products are live across seventeen NHS trusts and ten private clinics. There are five further products in development.
For more information visit: https://livingwith.health/
About Maria Moffatt:
Maria qualified as a physiotherapist in 2004 and has worked exclusively in the field of musculoskeletal physiotherapy since 2006. Maria developed an interest in pregnancy-related musculoskeletal conditions after returning to work following her second period of maternity leave in 2010, and undertook an NIHR funded Master of Research degree at Liverpool University in 2012 exploring the prevention and management of pregnancy-related pelvic girdle pain. Her interest in this area has continued and she is now registered as a part-time PhD student at Manchester Metropolitan University with the aim of completing her degree in 2022. Maria works for the NHS as a research physiotherapist at the Wrightington, Wigan and Leigh NHS Foundation Trust, but also works clinically in private practice.
