Shell LiveWIRE Awards toast the health of UCL enterpreneurs

Two social enterprises have been recognised for bringing together the best aspects of UCL’s long traditions in medical care, research and training and applying them to the health information needs of the public. 

FRAME Medical and MonMED Healthcare (placed first) received Shell LiveWIRE Grand Ideas Awards of £1,000 in February (www.shell-livewire.org); the awards are made monthly to the six most innovative ideas submitted by new businesses less than 12 months old.

In addition, Ali Att-Ul (Medicine) and Ricky Kotecha (Philosophy) of FRAME Medical and Owain Hughes (Inst. of Child Health) of MonMED will also be shortlisted for the £10,000 Shell LiveWIRE Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award, which will be announced in November. 

The awards are intended to ‘help build an even stronger community of entrepreneurs who can develop, learn, grow and support one another’ according to Shell.

FRAME Medical (www.framemedical.com) provides diabetes education and management programmes to people with Type-II diabetes. Its aim is to help people to manage their disease better and encourage them to take more responsibility for their health and well-being, while also raising awareness of the condition through charitable events and other campaigns.

Friends Ali and Ricky set up FRAME Medical after Ali compared the German and British markets for diabetic drugs and realised that there is a lack of comprehensive diabetes management programmes in the UK. 

Ricky, who has close relatives suffering from diabetes, says: “We hope to use the award to initiate a project that will take cultural differences into account and benefit an even larger group of people affected by the disease. This will entail developing a DVD of our programme in languages including Hindi, Bengali, Urdu and Swahili.” 

Ali adds: “We are grateful for the ongoing support of UCL Advances and Shell in making FRAME Medical a success.” The start-up has also recently won a UCL Bright Ideas Award.

MonMED Healthcare offers the public free, easy-to-access information about specialist healthcare. Using novel search methods, their first product, SpecialistHealthAdvice.com, is a one-stop-shop that allows patients to quickly find the hospital department that best meets their healthcare needs according to different criteria including symptoms, diagnosis or location. 

Owain says: “Winning a Shell LiveWIRE Award is a huge honour and will help us develop further our innovative healthcare search engine which makes it easy for patients to access excellent healthcare provision as well as the latest research.”