For any entrepreneur, there are few times as intense as the final hours before opening the doors on a new business; the practical panic of jobs-to-be-done compounded by the emotional intensity of ‘will it work?’. When Loretta Dignam, founder and CEO of The Menopause Hub, opened her first clinic in Dublin in December 2018, she experienced all the trademark tremors – and a lot more besides.
“At 10.30pm the night before the clinic opened, my mother passed away,” says Loretta. “She was 91 and we knew she was dying, but we really didn’t know how long it was going to be.”
Loretta powered through the opening of the menopause clinic, the first of its kind in Ireland and one of the first in the world at the time. “Honesty, I was just in a daze,” she recalls. “Once that day was over, I managed to get myself together.”
Her mother would surely be proud of her achievements with The Menopause Hub, which now has two clinics in Dublin and one in Cork. An ideas dynamo, Loretta aims to expand the clinic network in Ireland and overseas, while also nurturing a menopause training business, menopause workplace awards and an accreditation pathway for corporates.
The business could be seen as a tribute to her mother and all the generations of women who suffered in silence through menopause. “It’s like menopause has been secret for 2,000 years,” says Loretta. “It’s mad."
“I see now some of the things my mother suffered going through menopause, which were never talked about. You didn’t know what was going on, and there was no sympathy or empathy or understanding.”
From Loretta’s own experience, not much had changed by the time she started to experience menopausal symptoms herself. A self-confessed extrovert with a degree in Commerce and Masters in Marketing, she had a highly successful career at household-name companies including Mars, Diageo, Kerry Group and Jacob Fruitfield.
In 2011, she was named Marketer of the Year for her work on revitalising the Jacob Fruitfield “granny biscuit” range, which includes Fig Rolls, Kimberley, Mikado and Coconut Creams. After setting up her own consultancy, Loretta worked in a range of industries and served two terms on the board of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, where she chaired its Gender Equality Committee.
“I don’t knit, put it that way,” she says. “I love live events, I enjoy socialising. I’m into fitness – I love cycling up the mountains and I recently took up fencing.”
When her hot flushes started at age 49, Loretta was “completely blind-sided”. In hindsight, however, she had suffered a litany of ‘mystery’ symptoms in her forties: focal migraine; brain fog; urinary tract infections; night sweats; dizzy spells; sinus infections; receding gums; even a dry eye condition that saw her in the hospital ED three times.
“You have hair growing where you don’t want it and not growing where you do want it,” she says, able to laugh about it now. “No one mentioned menopause. The doctor told me I was having a bad run of it. The joke at home was, ‘Mum, you’re always sick’.”
“I even went so far as to buy a magnet that you put in your underwear to help with the hot flushes,” she says. “The only thing that happened was the wire basket in the supermarket went ‘whump’ and stuck to me.” Did it help at all with the hot flushes? “No.”
After three years, Loretta “gave in” and went for medical help. “I call it ‘giving in’ because I didn’t want HRT,” she says. After an unsatisfactory visit to a GP, a session with a functional medicine specialist, Dr Patrick Magovern, convinced her that much of what she thought about HRT was wrong.
Loretta started on transdermal hormone treatment, delivered through the skin, and quickly started to feel much better. Still lacking her “va va voom”, however, she started on testosterone. “I didn’t even know women could take testosterone, but I tried it and started to feel fantastic,” she says. “All my hormones were balanced, all my symptoms were gone and I was back to my old self.”
Loretta’s seminal moment came in January 2018, when she was having coffee with a female friend who was turning 60. Her friend picked up the café menu and was fanning her face. “I thought she was going to faint,” she recalls. “And she said, ‘I’m just having a moment, hot flushes’.”
It emerged that her friend had been having hot flushes for a decade but was not keen on HRT and had never sought medical help.
By her own admission, she didn’t have a clue about the medical world. She started researching the area and went on a training programme in the UK, where she was the only non-clinician. Through “a contact of a contact”, she got in touch with a recognised menopause doctor in Ireland, who was willing to come and work with her.
Drawing on her marketing expertise, Loretta used social media to promote the opening of The Menopause Hub in Mount Merrion in south Dublin. Even before the doors opened in December 2018, there was a waiting list. Patents would sometimes ask for an appointment with ‘Dr Dignam’ after seeing or hearing Loretta in the media talking about menopause.
“I did everything except see the patients,” she says. “I built the furniture, I painted the walls, I did the reception, I did the salaries, I emptied the bins. I did the website, I did the PR.”
The clinic started with a paper-based system but it was quickly obvious that technology would make life easier. Based on feedback from GPs and other clinicians, Loretta chose to use the Socrates electronic patient record technology, which has been part of Irish-founded healthtech company Clanwilliam since 2014.
The Menopause Hub clinic was thriving when Covid-19 struck in early 2020. While the doors were closed, technology allowed it to offer telehealth video consultations and electronic prescribing. If a woman needed a medical investigation, correspondence could be sent digitally to their local hospital.
“The pandemic forced the medical profession into a more digitised way of working,” says Loretta. “There was a huge acceleration. Going online meant people could access us from all around the country. Prior to that, we had women coming to Dublin from all over, because we were the only clinic in Ireland.”
The Menopause Hub took on more doctors, including consultant gynaecologist Dr Conor Harrity, who is now its Medical Director. Professor Nick Panay, a London-based consultant gynaecologist and President of the International Menopause Society, joined its Medical Advisory Board, after meeting Loretta at a conference.
“Medical credibility is really important for me,” says Loretta. “Because, who am I – this woman with a marketing degree – coming out to offer medical help?”
Her marketing expertise undoubtedly helped. She ran free and low-cost events, including a regular Wednesday night gathering called Midweek Menopause. Loretta is also visible in traditional and digital media spreading The Menopause Hub’s values, the “three Es” of education, empathy and empowerment.
She also has “three As” – awareness, accessibility and affordability – and her advocacy was a key part of a wider media and public conversation about menopause in recent years. State-funded specialist menopause clinics, dealing solely with complex cases, have since opened at Ireland’s maternity hospitals. In 2023, Ireland was the first country to run a public awareness campaign about menopause.
“I have been advocating with government ministers, with healthcare professionals, with anybody who will listen to me, quite frankly,” says Loretta. “If I could wave a magic wand, I would want every woman in Ireland to know about menopause, about perimenopause, to know about the symptoms, to have access to evidence-based information and to be able to make their own care decisions.”
She opened her second clinic, at Santry in north Dublin, in October 2022, to coincide with World Menopause Day – “the Christmas of menopause”. In October 2023, she opened her third clinic, in Cork.
“They are all connected in Socrates, which has facilitated wider accessibility to our services. HealthLink messaging and Healthmail [electronic prescribing] link into that. The level of engagement is huge” says Loretta. “Patients don’t even have to come to a clinic because their notes aren’t sitting in a cupboard, they’re in the system.”
Loretta is looking at Galway for her next location in Ireland, and has ambitions to take the business abroad, starting with English-speaking markets. She fields calls from people from all over the world wanting to talk about menopause.
“This could be everywhere, it really could,” she says. “There will be 1.1 billion menopausal women on the planet by 2030, one in eight of the global population. Yet you could go into a GP surgery and never see any information about menopause.”
While HRT worked for Loretta, she is clear that it is not the cure for everyone. The Menopause Hub offers a holistic service that includes a psychologist, a women’s health physiotherapist and a dietician and nutritionist. She plans to bring in specialists in sleep, weight and exercise. A new Menopause Hub app incorporates symptom tracking and an adjunct to a patient care pathway.
As the business has grown, Loretta has handed over day-to-day responsibility for the clinics, in order to focus on business development and strategy. Her Menopause Hub Academy offers CPD-accredited training about menopause and assists organisations with menopause support and policy development. Its clients have included Lidl Ireland, Bank of Ireland, An Post and the Irish civil service.
The Menopause Workplace Excellence Awards, meanwhile, were launched in 2023, in partnership with Great Places to Work, and accreditation for workplaces is on the way. Heading for six years in business, The Menopause Hub also has an arsenal of statistics that form an annual survey. Educating men about menopause is also on Loretta’s busy agenda.
“Menopause is where mental health was a decade ago,” she says. “We have women in their 20s coming to us and women in their 70s. The feedback we get is ‘you’ve changed my life’. People send us cards and chocolates
and flowers.”
Last year, Loretta was at a muddy music festival, soaked in a poncho, when a stranger called her name. “She was hugging me, crying, and she said ‘you saved my life’,” says Loretta. “That sense of purpose is amazing. I love what I’m doing and the sky’s the limit.”
Read more inspiring stories from some of our other Healthcare Trailblazers.
Back to Stories
