The turning point in Nguru’s career came one busy day in September 2020 as the NHS battled the raging Covid pandemic. Nguru was in the middle of her rounds as a locum doctor when she suddenly collapsed. She woke to find herself in a bed on the same acute medical ward where she’d just been caring for patients.
Nguru spent three days on the ward, and tests found she was suffering from chronic anaemia and burnout.
"Most of us were running on empty and operating in survival mode to cope with the continuous influx of patients with Covid and other life-threatening conditions," Nguru explains. "We all wanted to make the NHS work, despite the horrible working conditions."
From her hospital bed Nguru watched the junior doctor who’d been drafted in to replace her as he frantically tried to complete his rounds to the backdrop of patients complaining.
“I had an epiphany,” she explains. “I realised I was just a pawn in this larger section of the NHS. If I had died, they’d have just replaced me, and maybe sent a card to my family. But I’m irreplaceable to my family.”
A week later, Nguru left the NHS and started her journey towards becoming a wellness travel coach and consultant.
The power of travel
As the daughter of a Kenyan diplomat, Nguru spent her childhood travelling the globe. Her wanderlust continued into adulthood as she regularly booked holidays as a break from her busy medical career. She explains: “After particularly horrific shifts, I was travelling with the goal of rebuilding myself, refreshing my mindset and having that space to focus only on my wellbeing, and think about what direction I want my life to go in. Travel became a catalyst for positive transformation in my life.”
After leaving the NHS Nguru became a qualified cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) coach and an accredited mindfulness practitioner. While Covid restrictions meant travel was limited, she started researching the benefits of travel on wellbeing.
She explains: “In the UK a lot of physicians are now looking at lifestyle medicine, focusing on holistic and personalised patient care that focuses on natural prevention, like balanced nutrition, increased movement and the healing benefits of nature. If you go and see your doctor they might prescribe you to go and walk by the beach. I became enthralled by the idea of prescribing travel as medicine for the mind.”
What the doctor ordered
Nguru had been helping others book their travel since 2018 on a small scale outside her job as a doctor. She started building the foundations for a new business, which would combine her medical, CBT and mindfulness training, offering prescribed wellness travel. In 2021 she joined homeworking agency InteleTravel, and this February she launched her newly honed business model as What The Doctor Recommends.
Clients are asked to complete an in-depth behavioural-based questionnaire before speaking with Nguru, in which she explores their goals, the wellness experiences they enjoy and their past travel experiences. After analysing a client’s data, she prescribes a suitable destination and designs a comprehensive itinerary, which is sent with an email saying “your prescription is ready for pick-up”.
While each trip is tailored to a client’s needs and goals, they normally focus on helping individuals detox from technology and recover from occupational burnout, through wellness-based activities and “mindful destination exploration”. Clients can also receive CBT and mindfulness coaching from Nguru.
She explains: “We know there’s something very special about travelling. But we never truly disconnect and immerse ourselves and put our phones down, so that stress and burnout cycle never gets broken. People can spend a week partying on holiday and they come back and aren’t recovered, and haven’t built up any resilience.”
All of Nguru’s clients are high-net-worth women, who normally opt for solo trips. Many are in high-pressure jobs and facing what Nguru calls the “silent pandemic of occupational burnout”, or are going through major life transitions such as divorce.
She explains: “Some people have the gym, some go shopping, but for my clients travel tends to be something that lifts them and creates an environment that allows them to unplug and have space to deconstruct their feelings. Then they come back and we combine it with CBT to bring that transformation to the rest of their lives.”
Prescribed wellness travel consultations start at £695, and Nguru explains: "It’s inclusive of data analysis, comprehensive planning and high-impact coaching with a specialist wellness travel coach. My services are a wonderful example of valued outcomes far exceeding the cost of investment." She also offers bespoke wellness travel consultations without CBT coaching, with consultations starting from £150.
She continues: “The travel experiences I design are truly life-changing. My clients gain a wealth of positive life-coping skills that are priceless to them. The monetary aspect also filters out people who aren’t seriously committed to doing the hard work that comes with growth, introspection and actioning change in their lives.”
Nguru’s top wellness travel destinations include Italy, South Africa and Morocco, and she works directly with hoteliers and DMCs, building up a network of partners by attending events such as WTM London.
Nguru stresses she doesn’t provide a medical advisory service, and if she identifies other symptoms, such as very high levels of anxiety, clients are referred to other medical professionals so they can work on any acute conditions before booking a trip.
Expansion plans
The majority of clients find Nguru through social media, her Facebook groups or PR coverage. Nguru acknowledges that her approach is unique – claiming “I’m the only doctor in the world prescribing travel as medicine for the mind” – and she has ambitious growth plans.
In April 2023 she will launch a training course for medics looking to follow her lead and become a wellness travel coach and consultant, and they will operate under the What The Doctor Recommends brand. The course will be in partnership with the Travel Coach Network, for which Nguru is an ambassador, and will include travel coach training alongside business management, how to find clients, pitching a business and standing out from the competition. Her target is to recruit enough medics to help 100,000 professionals overcome burnout by being prescribed travel as therapy by 2024.
She also hopes to offer a corporate service, providing teams with travel wellness coaching, “It’s a low-cost, stress-management preventative solution that stops people getting to the stage of burnout,” she explains.
And her goals don’t stop there, as Nguru is also working with the College of Medicine and Integrated Health, with the aim of enabling doctors to prescribe wellness travel and holistic therapies on the NHS by 2024.
Nguru’s client base is still relatively small but she explains: “I’m getting the foundations right now, before I scale it up. I know next year is going to be the year that people will hear about What the Doctor Recommends.”
