A new business in New Brunswick is helping expecting parents to get the education and information they need to welcome the newest member of their families.
Registered nurse Lara Proud is the owner of Beyond The Bump Education, a business offering online prenatal and child safety courses. The company officially launched in March, just when the province’s state of emergency came into effect and prenatal courses offered by New Brunswick hospitals were cancelled.
Proud always had an interest in maternal health, but it wasn’t until she was pregnant herself that she realized improvements could be made in terms of offerings for expecting parents.
“I always had an interest in maternal-child healthcare. When I first graduated, I was living in the Dominican for a few months and helped start up a prenatal types program down there,” says Proud. “Then through my own pregnancy journey and after having a baby, it was overwhelmingly obvious that there were some gaps that felt like they needed to be fixed.”
Right now Beyond the Bump offers a general child safety workshop and an Empowered Birth workshop. The courses feature one Zoom call a week and then additional online learning materials.
“I actually have an online course platform as well so they can go in and I’ve got specialist interviews from all different maternal, child healthcare specialists,” says Proud. “I got book recommendations and handouts that I’ve made and homework-type [materials]. It’s not mandatory of course, but it’s more information for them and things they can work through to prepare themselves.”
Proud registered the business last April, but any nursing-related business she starts need to get approval by the nursing association.
“Because I’m an RN, I had to go through my nursing association to make sure that everything looked okay. In order to use the title “registered nurse” and have it considered nursing practice, there’s a little bit of a process they need to go through,” she says. “Once that happened and I got the go-ahead to say ‘yes, this is nursing,’ it was actually a week before this coronavirus started and all of the shutdowns started.”
In New Brunswick, the majority of prenatal classes are held by public health authorities, with a few options for private courses. But with most of those classes being held in-person, the COVID-19 crisis forced them to be cancelled, leaving expecting parents with limited options.
“It was fantastic timing in a way, but also people were really struggling because all of their classes all of a sudden were cancelled because everything was in-person. So luckily, I had most of the work from the last year in preparation of getting the approvals to go ahead.”
Proud just held her first online prenatal classes a few weeks back. She expected about five to 10 people. Instead, she got 30. She now has a waitlist and plans to offer another class starting June 2.
“I know those numbers are low for a lot of people, but it was fantastic for me,” says Proud. “I was so happy to know there was something that people wanted that I was able to help them with.”
Though Beyond The Bump was in the works long before COVID-19 took hold in Canada, Proud does say the crisis has given her new business and extra boost at launch.
“It’s really weird to say and it does make me feel a little bit bad in a way because I know the struggles that everybody is having right now,” she says. “But it definitely gave me the push that I needed, because this probably would have taken me a few months longer at the very least to get it out there and do that … It definitely gave me the push to go with this a lot faster than what I may have.”
In the future, as restrictions around containing COVID-19 loosen, Proud plans to incorporate some in-person components to her courses.
“I always wanted to do it as a mix of online and in-person,” she says. “I really value that in-person connection that people can make by actually being in the same room as people who are in the same situation as them.”
A version of this story was published in Huddle, an Acadia Broadcasting content partner.
