COUCH Health
Ash Rishi, CEO and Co-Founder
Meet Ash Rishi, CEO and Co-Founder of COUCH Health, a creative health engagement agency. Having taken on four apprentices over the past four years, Ash shared with us how onboarding apprentices has had a big impact on the company, and how instrumental degree apprenticeships are in creating a diverse and inclusive workplace environment.
Creating equity in the workplace
Our core company value at COUCH Health is about creating health equity, and we want that equity to be reflected in our business as well. We’re quite a niche company – we recruit patients to clinical trials – so it can be quite difficult to find marketing professionals who understand the regulations around what we do. Utilising the degree apprenticeship scheme has meant that we are able to nurture our own talent, bringing someone in and teaching them the regulatory landscape alongside their other responsibilities.
There can be quite a bit of academic snobbery in our industry, and it’s very important to me when we recruit our apprentices that we’re not choosing people who would have been given these opportunities if they chose the traditional route.
We want our workforce to reflect the mission at COUCH Health around diversity, equity and inclusion. We’ve recruited four apprentices over the past four years, and our apprentices have a mixture of different socio-economic statuses, ethnicities, neurodivergence and people living with rare conditions.
When we’re looking for clinical trial participants, often we are looking for people from different ethnicities, genders, age and socio-economic statuses, because those demographics are underrepresented in clinical trials. The youth that we’re bringing in through the degree apprenticeships are really getting the team to think differently, bringing a new energy, a new skill set, and their own lived experience, by being from the community we are trying to engage with. Intrinsically that’s building equity in our company and helping us to differentiate ourselves.
Bringing in new ways of thinking
The knowledge and skills that the apprentices are bringing back to the company are phenomenal. I’ve got nothing but positive things to say.
Our Digital User Experience degree apprentice is changing the way we do web design by being a key part of the review process for accessibility. Our Creative Digital Design Professional degree apprentice, Alicia, has written new brand guidelines that have changed the whole direction of our COUCH Health brand, and I can’t stress how impressive that is for a first-year digital design student with no digital design background. I could go on and on, give you loads of examples, but the ones that jump out are these ones that, though they seem simple, have had a huge impact on us as a small company. We didn’t need to commission senior level expertise for these areas because our apprentices were challenging us and bringing in new ways of thinking and doing.