Health and Wellbeing

When it comes to the wellbeing of your team, helping them feel seen and cared for is essential to both their own development and the culture and profitability of your company.

Attracting talent to East Anglia and retaining exemplary employees is vital to the growth of your business, and Wellbeing International’s programmes are a cost-effective way of drawing them in. 

Baby steps

Our infant massage-focused ‘Parenting Pack’ offers two different five-week programmes to help businesses keep their workforce, by ensuring that families feel valued and looked after during parental leave – investing in colleagues when they need it most.

The courses are aimed at helping parents strengthen their relationship with their young ones through securing attachment, growing in confidence, and feeling empowered, as well as developing skills when it comes to trouble with sleep, colic, and digestion. We have teams of highly qualified instructors across the UK, helping companies to offer this range of holistic support for single parents, couples, foster carers, and adoptive parents, including help to transition back into the workplace after being on leave.

According to the National Health Service, postnatal depression (PND) affects at least 1 in 10 women* and costs the NHS £1.7 billion a year**. Fathers can also experience PND, with many feeling disconnected from their baby, particularly in the first few months.

The first programme on ‘Infant Massage’ is run by the International Association of Infant Massage (IAIM). Research by Dr Carolynn Cheng† demonstrates that dads attending IAIM classes build networks with like-minded dads and increase their parental confidence. As such, wellbeing initiatives like ‘Infant Massage’ can reduce emotional stress for parents and lower financial overhead costs for businesses – surely a win-win.

The second initiative is the ‘Wellbeing for Mothers and Babies Programme’, which helps mothers learn the fundamental aspects of physical, emotional, and mental wellbeing for themselves and their babies. It aims to deepen the attachment and bonding process through Wellbeing’s ‘Story Massage’, and teaches parenting essentials like how to sleep well, build a parenting community, and manage technology. We also have our ‘Wellbeing for Fathers and Babies Programme’ launching in 2025.

Feedback

Wellbeing International recently piloted its ‘Parenting Pack’ initiative with the Design Council, whose CEO, Minnie Moll, said: “While this benefit is absolutely for fathers too, it is particularly important to help women who take a career break to have children. Our baby massage initiative is a small gesture that we hope says a lot about how much we value our colleagues.”

Infant massage is rarely considered to be integral to the wellbeing of employees, specifically young families, and Wellbeing International is here to change that with our business-savvy programme that helps your company grow from the inside out, prioritising the wellness of young parents with a fresh, low-cost innovative approach.

* https://www.nhs.uk/mental-health/conditions/post-natal-depression/overview/

** https://www.centreformentalhealth.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/costsofperinatalsummary.pdf

† https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3210630/