Founder of Mothercore | Digital Marketer | Marketing Strategist | Communication Specialist | Advisor | Social Media Marketing Expert
Every corner of healthcare is currently racing to automate the consultation. Chatbots for triage, apps for self-guided programmes, algorithms standing in for the appointment. When Ksenia Fortin-Brazeau founded her company in May 2025, her first structural decision was to do it differently
“The more automated healthcare becomes, the more valuable a real clinician is.”
Registered physiotherapists, live, one to one.It is the harder model to build. Her argument is that the easier ones do not always drive outcomes.
The Marketer Who Built a Company Around People
Ksenia Fortin-Brazeau is the founder of Mothercore, a UK women’s health platform delivering virtual pelvic floor physiotherapy across pregnancy, postpartum, perimenopause and menopause. She spent fifteen years before that in media and brand marketing, on Apple and Sony at Manning Gottlieb OMD, on confectionery and food at Nestlé, and finally leading integrated consumer experience at Danone Healthcare. She built Mothercore because she fell through the cracks between the NHS waiting list and expensive private healthcare.
Lancaster, Media Buying, and a Morning She Did Not Plan For
She studied advertising and marketing at Lancaster University, finishing in 2011 after a media foundation year in London, and started where most media careers start: assisting on digital campaigns. At Manning Gottlieb OMD she moved up over four years from planning assistant to client account manager, working across Apple, Sony Music, Sony Home Entertainment and Square Enix .
Nestlé followed, where she led social and search strategy for the UK and Ireland whilst overseeing media for confectionery and food brands and running digital training for the company’s own marketers. In 2019 she moved to Danone, rising from content and engagement manager at Cow & Gate to team lead of integrated consumer experience at Danone Healthcare, working on Nutricia brands
Fifteen years across categories where the regulator and the consumer are both watching closely.
“Every claim, every piece of packaging, every word of communication is under a microscope, and you learn quickly that credibility compounds.”
That lesson turned out to be portable in a way she did not anticipate, because by then something else had happened.
At 25 weeks pregnant with her first child, she thought her waters had broken. She spent a stressful morning in a maternity day assessment unit undergoing tests, and was told it was likely the beginning of incontinence. The symptoms stayed after labour. At her six-week postnatal check she was given two options: an NHS waiting list running to months, or private care, which would be faster.
Private care solved her problem. It also meant paying a lot out of pocket and turning the session into a logistics exercise, car seat, pram and newborn included.”
What stayed with her was the question underneath it. What happens to the woman who cannot wait months and cannot afford private, or who lives nowhere near a clinic, or who simply cannot get to one with an infant in tow.
Live Clinicians, and Where Exactly Technology Fits
“Mothercore is the answer I wanted at the time.”
Every session runs with an HCPC and CSP-registered physiotherapist, because the care that worked for her was clinician-led and she was not prepared to substitute something thinner. The subject itself demands it.
“This is a subject most women won’t discuss even with close friends.”
It also, she argues, does not resolve on generic advice, since a plan has to account for symptoms, medical history, posture and how an individual body manages pressure. Which is why the format matters as much as the clinician.
“And we are virtual. The appointment comes to her, at home, without a commute, a waiting room or childcare to arrange.”
“The obvious assumption is that a screen makes the job easier. She argues the reverse. Without a hands-on assessment, a physiotherapist has to read the problem from history, movement and the patient’s own description of it, and that is a skill built over years of in-person practice. Virtual assessment raises the bar for the clinician, which is why Mothercore hires experienced physiotherapists and not junior ones.”
“That demands more of the clinician, not less.”
Technology does have a place in her model, and she is precise about where: not in the assessment or the diagnosis — those stay with the physiotherapist — but in the weeks between sessions, where the recovery actually has to happen. Programmes fail, she argues, through drop-off and lack of consistency – here’s where the right level of AI-enabled support can do its magic.
She is equally direct about her own limits.
“I’m not a clinician, and I couldn’t build a brand with a real future without strong clinical leadership beside me.”
That is an unusual thing for a founder to say out loud, and it shaped the decision order: clinical framework, session protocols and evidence-based practice first, marketing second.
The traction figure she watches hardest is retention. By her account seven in ten women book a follow-up appointment, in a field where she says the standard experience is a leaflet and nothing after it. She points to France, where a woman leaves her postnatal check with a prescription for ten state-covered rehabilitation sessions, against a UK experience that ends with a referral she may never receive.
“Awareness without access doesn’t produce recovery.”
Informed women with symptoms they treat as their new normal is not, in her view, a solved problem.
One patient she returns to is a woman in her seventies who had lived with urinary incontinence for years and had been through an incontinence clinic without coming away with any sense of what to do or whether anything could change. Working with one of Mothercore’s physiotherapists, what she reported was not a statistic. It was that after years of assuming the condition was permanent, she could finally see light at the end of the tunnel.
It also shapes who she hires. Ksenia screens for the ability to listen as deliberately as for clinical expertise, because for many women the appointment is the first time they spoke about their symptoms out loud – and it’s not easy.
“Every woman has a story behind the symptoms.”
A difficult labour, or years of something that has quietly worn away at a relationship, at self-esteem, at the ability to play with her own children.
“Our physiotherapists’ first job is to listen deeply. The treatment plan comes after that.”
What She Refuses to Automate
The bet looks contrarian only until you sit in the assessment unit at 25 weeks and get told what she was told. No app would have answered that morning. No self-guided programme would have handled the six-week check.
Mothercore is fifteen months old, and Ksenia Fortin-Brazeau has built it around the most valuable component available to her, on the argument that it is the only part that cannot be substituted.
Everything else can be automated. The human interaction cannot.
Ksenia Fortin-Brazeau is the founder of Mothercore, based in London, United Kingdom. Mothercore delivers virtual one-to-one pelvic floor physiotherapy with registered clinicians to women through pregnancy, postpartum, perimenopause and menopause. To connect with Ksenia or learn more, visit https://mothercore.co.uk/ or her LinkedIn Profile
