In this week’s Practitioner Spotlight interview, I spoke to Dr Rita Nandi - founder and medical director of The Bloom Clinic. She gave me the lowdown on what inspired her to open her clinic, and why she is invested in supporting charities through her aesthetics work.
Glowday Practitioner Spotlight - Dr Rita Nandi
Hi Dr Rita! The Bloom Clinic sounds like it’s a lot more than just aesthetics. Talk me through the idea behind it.
The idea behind The Bloom Clinic came about because we wanted to offer a holistic approach to self-improvement, not just through aesthetics but through expert advice on fitness, mindset and nutrition. We are lucky to be working with amazing partners – some of the UK’s top life coaches, fitness coaches, nutritional experts and a fantastic charity working hard to support food banks in the UK. We thought it was really important to give back through our work, hence why we partnered up with a charity whose work is especially important right now as a lot of people are going through hardship during the pandemic. Having worked for the NHS for 14 years, it was important to me to create a clinic where I could give back to the community as well as enhance people’s lives.
Wow! What a place! So what was it that first led you into aesthetics?
I had been thinking about aesthetics on and off since medical school, after a placement in general practice. The general practitioner I was shadowing told me one day that after his surgery, he was going over to his own aesthetics clinic, where he would be treating a list of Botox clients. That was the first time I’d really come across it, so I asked him loads of questions about it and started looking into it but it was not really seen as a medical specialty back then which put me off. Then, life in the NHS took over and I got swept up in working hard and completing my postgraduate medical training.
I loved both medicine and surgery as a medical student and junior doctor. I was always strong in practical procedures and considered surgery but then, I realised that the most enjoyable aspect of medicine other than the challenge of being able to diagnose, was patient interaction - getting to know them, chatting with them and making them feel heard. That’s what led me to becoming a GP. What led me back to exploring a career in aesthetics was my own ageing process. At the age of 35 and onwards, I noticed that my face was starting to change, and when I started to look into aesthetic treatments myself, and seeing what an impact non-surgical enhancement could achieve, I decided to explore the industry as a career. It’s a science as well as an art and it allows me to show my creative side. It gives me lots of job satisfaction when a client sees an immediate change and walks out more confident and happier than when they walked in.
What’s one of the most satisfying things about working in aesthetics?
Not having to rush, and being able to spend more time with clients. Especially coming from a GP background, where you just have ten minutes with a patient. In aesthetics, I get to give clients a lot more time and not have to keep them waiting. There’s a lot more flexibility and I love being my own boss. But being able to make people feel better - that’s what makes me tick.
You’ve said your mantra is “live life in full bloom”. How did this come about and what does this really mean? And how does aesthetics play a role in this?
I’d summarise it as empowering people to be the best version of themselves and to live their best life. With aesthetic treatments, it’s all about enhancing and refreshing your natural features, so if you have, for example, jowls that are starting to appear, your confidence might start to drop as you may not feel as attractive as before, or you may feel you look older than how you feel inside. Aesthetics changes your outlook and the way you see yourself, and it can have a knock-on effect on other areas of your life.
You’re very much into supporting charities, aren’t you? Talk to me about your association with the Trussell Trust. How did that come about?
I’ve always supported charities in one way or another since my late teens. It’s very important to me and I like to give back. When we set up The Bloom Clinic, we chose to work with a charity with an important cause where we could advertise the work they do on our website and social media, and we chose the Trussell Trust, as it is not that well known but such an important charity. Especially right now with the COVID crisis pushing more people than ever to food banks and below the poverty line.
The Trussell Trust provides a central source of support and guidance to 1200 food banks within the UK. They also offer guidance on how someone can support their local foodbank. They work alongside the government through their campaigning and research to better understand the factors which lead to people needing foodbanks in order to bring about infrastructural and legislation change. In the current crisis, they’ve been working endlessly to make sure more people are supported.
What we do at The Bloom Clinic is donate £1 from each transaction of £100 or above (which is most of our transactions) to the Trussell Trust.
That’s a lovely thing to do, and no doubt helps many people! What are your goals for the future?
At the moment we are just enjoying the journey. We are focusing on providing an excellent customer experience at our clinic and are receiving lots of lovely feedback. We are offering clinically effective treatments that achieve reproducible results. We only use the very best products and top-of-the-range devices such as the SkinPen microneedling device, which is the gold-standard in microneedling devices. We have recently passed our Save Face assessment and will be officially accredited in the coming weeks. We are also members of the aesthetic safety bodies JCCP, CMAC and ACE Group. We pride ourselves on being a safe and ethical clinic, putting high quality of care and client safety first. In the future, I’d love to help clients use non-surgical treatments to help with facial disfigurement.
