Company
Trusted digital support. Designed with care. Delivered with integrity.
People turn to their phones when something feels wrong. We help organisations meet them there - with clear, trusted health support that genuinely helps, without adding risk, noise, or pressure.
Expert Self Care works with organisations across health, education, community services, and industry to make reliable self-care guidance easy to share, easy to trust, and easy to use - at scale.
The challenge we help you solve
You want to support people well - especially those who are underserved, overwhelmed, or hard to reach. But in practice, that’s not easy.
Health information is often:
- fragmented across websites, leaflets, and services
- hard to access at the right moment
- inconsistent, outdated, or unreliable
The result is confusion for people - and avoidable pressure on services.
That’s where we come in.
Our purpose
To reduce confusion and uncertainty around health - by helping organisations put clear, trusted support into people’s hands, so people feel more confident, and services can focus care where it’s needed most.
Who we are
Expert Self Care was founded in 2012 by Dr Knut Schroeder, a UK GP with over 30 years’ experience in the NHS and higher education.
What began as a single student health app has grown into a portfolio of nationally and internationally used, award-winning, digital tools, supporting people across a wide range of health and wellbeing needs.
We’re a small, specialist core team by design. This allows us to stay hands-on, work closely with partners, and scale impact without losing care, accountability, or trust.
Our strength lies in how we work:
- clinically led
- highly collaborative
- grounded in public service values
- focused on doing fewer things, exceptionally well
Behind every app is a wider ecosystem: clinicians, partner organisations, lived-experience contributors, reviewers, and delivery teams - often involving 10+ partner organisations and dozens of contributors on a single project.
We're used to working with the governance, procurement, and assurance expectations of large organisations.
What this means for you: a partner who combines national-scale experience with hands-on delivery, and who stays closely involved from the first conversation to long after launch.
What we do (and how it helps)
You’re trying to support people earlier - before confusion turns into crisis - while managing rising demand and limited capacity.
We help by designing and delivering trusted self-care apps that make it easier for people to understand their health, find the right support, and for your teams to focus where they’re needed most.
Our apps help you to:
- Reach people earlier with clear, practical guidance they can trust
- Reduce avoidable demand by supporting safer self-care and better decisions
- Ease pressure on teams with consistent, shareable resources
- Strengthen trust through calm, evidence-informed digital support
Our apps complement your existing services - they don’t replace care, and they don’t try to do everything.
Think of them as a trusted front door, a pocket guide, and a calm, reliable place people can return to - whenever they need support.
Who we support
We work with NHS teams, universities, charities, local authorities, national bodies, and employers to support priority groups, including:
- Students and young people navigating mental health challenges alongside study and life pressures
- People who self-harm or feel suicidal, who need calm, non-judgemental guidance and clear next steps
- Those living with eating disorders, often managing long-term, complex needs
- Young carers and their families, balancing responsibility far beyond their years
- Irish farmers, facing isolation, financial pressure, and demanding working lives
- Offshore helicopter maintenance teams, working in high-pressure, safety-critical environments
We closely collaborate and co-create with users and subject-matter experts, so content feels relevant, practical, and compassionate - not generic, overwhelming, or detached from real life.
Across every group, the goal is the same: to help people feel more confident, informed, and supported - before problems escalate.
What makes us different
When you’re working in health, education, public service, or any other organisation with a duty of care, how something is built matters as much as what is built.
Expert Self Care brings clinical judgement, digital craft, and collaborative working together - carefully, deliberately, and with real people in mind.
What sets us apart is how we work:
- Clinically grounded and people-centred. Our work is clinically led and co-created with users, partners, and subject-matter experts - so decisions are informed by evidence and lived experience.
- Small core team with wide collaborative reach. We stay intentionally small to remain agile and hands-on, while working with a wider ecosystem of trusted partners and reviewers to deliver at national and international scale.
- Everything connected under one roof. Strategy, content, quality assurance, design, and delivery sit closely together - reducing risk, friction, and the gaps that often appear when work is fragmented across suppliers.
- Independent and values-led. We’re privately owned, free from shareholder pressure, and guided by long-term public benefit - not short-term growth.
- Focused on what genuinely helps. We don’t build for novelty or noise. We focus on calm, usable support that fits alongside existing services and earns trust over time.
What this means for you: A partner who is thoughtful, responsive, and accountable - able to move at pace without cutting corners, and to scale impact without losing care, integrity, or trust.
How we work
Expert Self Care is a small, specialist senior team with deep clinical, academic, and digital health experience.
We work as a distributed team by design, collaborating closely with clinicians, partner organisations, and people with lived experience across the UK and Ireland.
This approach allows us to:
- Stay focused on quality and impact, rather than overheads
- Work flexibly with partners, wherever they are
- Invest more time and resource into content, governance, and support
- Remain responsive and sustainable as a long-term partner
While our team works remotely, our work is anything but distant. We are closely embedded in the communities, sectors, and services we support - and are used to working with large organisations, public bodies, and regulated partners.
We operate with clear governance, robust quality assurance, and long-term continuity - and have supported national organisations, universities, NHS services, charities, and industry partners for over a decade.
How we're funded
We’re an independent, privately owned company - founded and grown with integrity.
Our work is supported through:
- subscriptions for local editions of our apps
- commissioned branded apps
- grants from trusted public and not-for-profit bodies
- carefully chosen ethical partnerships
Our commitment is simple: All our apps remain free to download and use - with no ads, no paywalls, and no personal data collection.
This means our decisions are guided by public-service values - not advertising, data sales, or shareholder pressure.
Recognition
Our work has been recognised for quality, safety, and real-world impact, including:
- British Medical Association Patient Information Award for Wellbeing - distrACT app
- Nursing Times Award - Continence Care (CONfidence app)
We see recognition not as an end in itself, but as an independent reassurance that our work meets high clinical and professional standards.
Let's talk
If you’re open to exploring safer, more effective ways to support people - and want a partner who values trust, clarity, and care as much as you do - we'd be happy to start a conversation.