MrMed’s ‘Care for the Caregiver’ asks families to look beyond the patient

‘Care for the Caregiver’, an initiative recognising family members who support loved ones through serious illness, often without anyone asking how they are doing.

The initiative opens with ‘Kuch Hoga Toh Batana’ (loosely translated as “let me know if there is anything I can do”), a four-and-a-half-minute film directed by Sonal Batra. It follows Karishma, who has spent eight months caring for her father through chemotherapy, as a friend visits with food. Through everyday sacrifices, including postponed self-care and lost connections with friends, the film highlights the often-overlooked impact of caregiving. It closes with an appeal, without a product or brand claim.

Created around the conviction that every household has had, or will have, a caregiver, the initiative encourages families, workplaces and friends to offer more meaningful support. Alongside the film, a full-page print appeal has carried the message to a wider audience, with a dedicated website and planned offline activations set to extend the conversation.

The initiative began several months ago on MrMed’s Impact Day, when the team pledged their time to caregivers.

Devashish Singh, Co-Founder and CEO, MrMed, said: “One of our first customers was a gentleman I will call Mr Iyer. His first message to me came on 18 August 2021, buying cancer medicines for his wife. Over the next two years he sent me research papers and videos, anything he thought might help.. He read everything, chased everything, questioned everything. That is the extent to which a caregiver will go to make sure the person they love is looked after. His last message came in July 2023: ‘Devashish, good morning. She passed away Monday morning. A valiant fight. Grateful for all your support.’

What has stayed with me is what came back. Once a caregiver finds someone who actually helps them, they start passing that help on, sharing what they have learned with the next family, the next person sitting in the same ward. It is because of people like Mr Iyer that we have learned and grown as a company. Almost everything we understand about this journey, they taught us. And in all the conversations around a patient’s health, we still rarely stop to ask how the caregiver is doing. ‘Care for the Caregiver’ is us asking. This one is for Mr Iyer, and for everyone like him.”

Saurab Jain, Co-Founder and CEO, MrMed, said: “Every refill order has a date behind it that somebody is tracking. In our experience that somebody is almost never the patient. It’s a family member holding a calendar in their head for months at a stretch. When treatment breaks, it’s usually not because the science failed. It’s because that person ran out of money, leave or energy.”

Chaitalli Roy and Tejas Mehta, leading The Narrative by CPR Global, said: “The hardest part was resisting the obvious route. Celebrating the caregiver, a person almost everyone has looked straight past, is not a conventional thing for a brand to do, and there was no template for it.

We did not want anyone to simply view this. We wanted them to feel it. That meant everything had to be made with the same care, the film, the voices of people telling their own stories, the print appeal, what happens on the ground, because each had to land on its own terms rather than lean on the rest. Nothing is a repurposed asset. Every piece was thought through separately and put together consciously, so that the initiative resonates at every step, with everyone who meets it, in whatever form they meet it in.

The response has been phenomenal. People recognise someone they know in it, and caregivers recognise themselves. If it makes one person ask a caregiver how they are doing, and genuinely wait for the answer, then we have started a conversation worth having.”