Meet #OurEntrepreneurs. Today we welcome Helen James at Patient Entrepreneur and Founder of Nutriri based in the South West
Tell us a bit about yourself
I am thrilled to be part of Cohort 2 of the Patient Entrepreneur Programme this year. Nutriri.org is in its 10th year of gathering lived experiences from both citizens and workforce, on how it has felt trying to deliver on ‘weight management’ and on the multiple health impacts of talking about weight and weight change.
Name: Helen James, NHS Clinical Entrepreneur Patient Cohort
Occupation: Founder Nutriri
For years I was a member of ‘slimming’ clubs and changing my body weight drastically many times, I never learnt how to have a better food relationship, or found movement that I felt welcome at, enjoyed and sustained. So very naively in 2015 I set up a weekly meet up in my local town and started listening for what we could do instead.
Tell us about your innovation
Neighbourhood Health Hubs – Preventive health engagement is critically low—only 1 in 10 eligible individuals participate in NHS Health Checks or Diabetes Structured Education. Nutriri identifies a key barrier: the focus on weight change and BMI surveillance, which contributes to poor uptake and engagement. This weight-centric approach fuels weight stigma, affecting people across all body sizes and leading to underdiagnosis of conditions. Despite growing consensus from bodies like The Lancet and NICE, BMI remains a dominant health metric, hindering effective policy and care.
Nutriri created the Food and Body Ease Community, which led to the development of our Workforce Weight Neutral Training programme. This training helps professionals identify internalised weight stigma, build bias awareness, and gain confidence to de-stigmatise services. It also supports our customer acquisition strategy. Through this initiative, we aim to pilot a social franchise model and expand our co-learning hub, scaling from digital to hybrid/in-person formats—reviving our roots of weekly meetups to boost engagement around food and movement.
What do you hope to get from the programme and your goals for the next 12 months
In 2024, I had a non-academic poster accepted at the Royal Society of Medicine’s Tackling Inequalities conference. While attending, I saw Tony Young host a panel of inspiring Clinical Entrepreneurs. Motivated by what I saw, I put my hand up and asked to join the Patient Cohort 1—but unfortunately, I missed the application deadline. As a patient, I was thrilled to catch the 2025 application window and apply successfully this time.
The programme aligns beautifully with my learning style—what I call kinesthetic emotional osmosis: learning by doing, feeling, and showing up authentically. While I may appear confident, I’m an overthinking introvert still exploring my own neurodivergent traits. I’ve heard many entrepreneurs are “neuro-spicy,” which might explain why I already feel so at home in this community. I’m excited to witness the evolution of everyone’s innovations and reflect on the twists and turns ahead.
As a VCSE, Nutriri is already well networked—we’re Core20PLUS5 Ambassadors, Social Prescribing Champions with NASP, and members of The Health Foundation’s Health Equals campaign, National Voices, and the King’s Fund #DoWith Movement. We hope this programme will help us connect more of these dots—accelerating action, funding, and acceptance of our mission to #MeasureHealthNotWeight.
Since joining the programme, we’ve already seen increased traction across our networks. Over the next 12 months, Nutriri aims to champion the ‘Enterprise’ in VCSE by developing sustainable, community-led health hubs as inclusive alternatives to traditional slimming clubs. We intend to disrupt a market worth over £500 million annually—currently spent on weight-focused programmes—by offering weight-neutral, community-based support for food and movement. We also plan to scale our Weight Neutral Training to support the NHS in moving away from diet culture and toward more person-centred care. In parallel, we will pilot a social franchise model and expand our co-learning hub, enabling us to grow from digital delivery to hybrid and in-person formats. Through these efforts, we hope to empower a neighbourhood ecosystem to lead a much-needed paradigm shift in health engagement and reduce reliance on recurrent grant funding.
Why do you think innovation in healthcare is important?
I think every frontline worker, midline manager and citizen holds part of the puzzle to make healthcare better. Just as we have yellow card systems for near misses and calling out problems, wouldn’t it be good to see a robust green card system to contribute these puzzle pieces to – to inform better. Innovation as quality improvement informed by lived and living experiences from citizens and workforce.