Built because nothing like it existed.
SUMM was created to solve a specific, documented problem: professional women in their 40s experiencing significant health changes with nowhere reliable to turn.
The information gap was well documented. The solutions were not.
Women entering perimenopause face a clinical system that was not designed for them. Symptoms are dismissed. Blood tests come back normal. Only 7% of GPs report feeling confident managing perimenopause. Women are sent away without answers.
The symptoms (brain fog, broken sleep, anxiety without a trigger, fatigue that does not improve with rest) are clinically recognised and treatable. But they overlap with burnout, thyroid dysfunction, and nutritional deficiency. Without a tool to distinguish those patterns, women spend years assuming they are burning out when the cause is hormonal.
The supplement market offered no better answers. Underdosed ingredients, unvalidated claims, no connection to the clinical evidence base. Women were spending money on products that could not work.
Three gaps. One platform.
No signal check
No tool existed that helped women distinguish between perimenopause, thyroid dysfunction, and burnout based on their specific symptoms. We built one.
No nutrition layer
Nothing connected perimenopause symptoms to evidence-based nutritional interventions. We created that connection with a Women's Health Registered Dietitian.
No GP preparation tool
Women were arriving at GP appointments unprepared and leaving dismissed. We built a downloadable summary that gives them structured data to take in.
NHS service design principles. Clinical evidence base.
SUMM was founded by Shirley Sarker, a former NHS Digital service design lead and AstraZeneca R&D clinical trials researcher. The platform applies the same standards used in NHS digital services: evidence-based, user-tested, and transparent about what it can and cannot do.
The symptom signal check draws on four published clinical frameworks: NICE NG23, STRAW+10, the EMAS 2024 position statement on thyroid disease and menopause, and the WHO burnout definition.
What SUMM is not.
- SUMM is not a diagnostic tool. It is an educational symptom signal check.
- SUMM does not replace a GP or specialist. It helps women prepare for those conversations.
- SUMM does not sell health data. All data is anonymised and GDPR compliant.
- SUMM is not a supplement brand that created content as an afterthought. It is a platform built around the specific needs of professional women in perimenopause.
The mission.
Every woman in her 40s experiencing significant health changes should be able to find clear, evidence-based information quickly, understand which clinical pattern her symptoms most resemble, and arrive at a GP appointment prepared rather than dismissed.
We built SUMM to close that gap.