Oct 12: MrMed, an online pharmacy for super-specialty and critical care medicines serving patients across India, has launched ‘Care for the Caregiver,’ an initiative for the family member who carries a household through a serious illness, and who is almost never asked how they are doing.

The person nobody asks about

When someone in a family is seriously ill, attention centres on the patient, the treatment, the medicines, the appointments, the recovery. Alongside them is another person carrying the weight of it. Nobody appoints them. They simply become the caregiver. It costs them their work, their friendships, the hours that used to be their own. They are rarely asked how they are holding up. When they are, they say ‘I am fine’.

‘Care for the Caregiver’ urges families to turn to one more person in the room and ask how they are doing. It urges workplaces to recognise that an employee caring for a seriously ill parent, spouse or child is carrying something no leave policy currently accounts for. And it urges friends to offer something specific, rather than the familiar line: let me know if there is anything I can do.

The film

The initiative opens with ‘Kuch Hoga Toh Batana’ (loosely translated as let me know if there is anything I can do), a four-and-a-half-minute film. It follows Karishma, who has spent eight months caring for her father through chemotherapy, across one ordinary afternoon when a friend drops by with food.

What she has given up surfaces almost by accident. A visit to the parlour, postponed again. Friends she no longer finds the time to reply to. Each is something most people would not think about twice, and each has quietly slipped out of reach The film closes with no product and no claim, only an appeal.

The film has been directed by Sonal Batra.

 More than a film

'Care for the Caregiver' was conceptualised around a simple conviction: that every household has had (or will have) a caregiver.

The film anchors it. A full-page print appeal carried it to the masses. The work does not stop at a screen or a newspaper page. A dedicated website now holds the initiative in one place (https://www.mrmed.in/care-for-caregivers), and a series of offline activations is planned to carry the conversation to the grassroots.

The initiative has been several months in the making, beginning on the company's Impact Day, when the MrMed team pledged their time to caregivers.

Quotes

Devashish Singh, Co-Founder and CEO, MrMed

“One of our first customers was a gentleman I will call Mr Iyer. His first message to me came on 18 August 2021, buying cancer medicines for his wife. Over the next two years he sent me research papers and videos,  anything he thought might help.. He read everything, chased everything, questioned everything. That is the extent to which a caregiver will go to make sure the person they love is looked after. His last message came in July 2023: ‘Devashish, good morning. She passed away Monday morning. A valiant fight. Grateful for all your support.’

What has stayed with me is what came back. Once a caregiver finds someone who actually helps them, they start passing that help on, sharing what they have learned with the next family, the next person sitting in the same ward. It is because of people like Mr Iyer that we have learned and grown as a company. Almost everything we understand about this journey, they taught us. And in all the conversations around a patient’s health, we still rarely stop to ask how the caregiver is doing. ‘Care for the Caregiver’ is us asking. This one is for Mr Iyer, and for everyone like him.”

 Saurab Jain, Co-Founder and CEO, MrMed

"Every refill order has a date behind it that somebody is tracking. In our experience that somebody is almost never the patient. It's a family member holding a calendar in their head for months at a stretch. When treatment breaks, it's usually not because the science failed. It's because that person ran out of money, leave or energy.”

 Chaitalli Roy and Tejas Mehta, leading The Narrative by CPR Global

"The hardest part was resisting the obvious route. Celebrating the caregiver, a person almost everyone has looked straight past, is not a conventional thing for a brand to do, and there was no template for it.

We did not want anyone to simply view this. We wanted them to feel it. That meant everything had to be made with the same care, the film, the voices of people telling their own stories, the print appeal, what happens on the ground, because each had to land on its own terms rather than lean on the rest. Nothing is a repurposed asset. Every piece was thought through separately and put together consciously, so that the initiative resonates at every step, with everyone who meets it, in whatever form they meet it in.

The response has been phenomenal. People recognise someone they know in it, and caregivers recognise themselves. If it makes one person ask a caregiver how they are doing, and genuinely wait for the answer, then we have started a conversation worth having."

 Voices in support

Since the film's release, several public figures have come out in support of recognising the caregiver, sharing their own caregiving stories with their audiences.

Sonu Sood, actor and philanthropist  —  https://www.instagram.com/p/Dd5mwATHwe3/

Farah Khan Kunder, filmmaker  —  https://www.instagram.com/p/Dd5wEopH0VO/

Radhika Gupta, MD and CEO, Edelweiss Mutual Fund  —  https://lnkd.in/p/dE9VqPp9

Ashish Vidyarthi, actor  —  https://www.instagram.com/reel/Dd9EJy0iCiJ/

Arjun Vaidya, investor  —  https://lnkd.in/p/dAth79MH

 MrMed says the film is only the start, and that ‘Care for the Caregiver’ is framed as an appeal because the change it asks for cannot be delivered by any one company. What a caregiver needs is not a product. It is to be noticed.