People with new babies are obsessed with sleep – and often a lack thereof. But for Mandy Gurney, the sleepless nights she suffered after the birth of her baby did not just lead to endless cups of tea and chats comparing notes with other new parents. Instead, it sparked an obsession that would lead her towards a whole new career.

Gurney was not new to the idea that babies can have troublesome nocturnal habits. A nurse who had worked as midwife in the NHS and private sector, she retrained as a health visitor in 1990. Even before her son was born, she had spent years working with the tired-out parents of new babies and young children. But it was her experience as a new mother that brought the importance of sleep to the fore. “When my son was born he had very severe food allergies and really bad reflux,” she says. “He cried day and night, because he was in so much pain. Then I knew what sleep deprivation was about.”

When she returned to work, she sought advice from her colleagues. “I asked everyone ‘what do you do?’ and no one knew. It really struck me. I thought, ‘I have all this knowledge, and so do all these people I work with, and none of us knows what to do in this situation.’

Gurney set out to make herself an expert in the field. “There was very little research about sleep available at the time, but what there was, I read. I researched thoroughly and, eventually, I was given permission to set up a sleep clinic part-time in St Charles hospital in Ladbroke Grove, London, in conjunction with working as a health visitor.”

The clinic was quickly inundated, with GPs and health visitors from outside the hospital referring babies and children up to the age of five for sleep problems. The methods they used got results, and they saw plenty of improvement among their patients. Over lunch one day, Gurney and a colleague decided they should attempt to up the scale by creating a private sleep clinic. “We couldn’t go any further than we had within the NHS at the time,” she says.

Millpond Sleep Clinic was launched in 2000 and Gurney became a professional sleep therapist, balancing the new venture with her NHS job for the first year. “We did a little bit of advertising, wrote a few articles for magazines and built a website. We were soon working with a lot of families locally but we noticed that people had friends who were further away who wanted to ask us for help. We couldn’t travel all over the country so we set up a consultation service that people could access by phone and email.”

The sleep therapists at Millpond now work with people all over the world, helping families with babies through to teenagers. “We take into account the age of child, information about the parents, and any other factors. We draw on all our experience in nursing and as health visitors, and everything we do is evidence-based. Sometimes it comes down to diet and with a few first-time mums recently we have given advice on nutrition, making sure they were giving their babies enough protein. With a reflux baby, we will talk about medication and how to manage a baby with reflux. We are often the last port of call for parents, when they’ve tried everything, read every book, checked every forum on the internet,” says Gurney.

With so many sleep problems among babies and children, it’s not surprising that Millpond has proved popular – though it’s not a cheap option. A package of four consultations, for example, costs £275.

There are now five sleep therapists working at Millpond who are all trained nurses, midwives and health visitors with experience working with parents and children in the NHS. As well as these professional qualifications, Millpond looks for people who have a good understanding and knowledge of up-to-date research into sleep and behaviour modification. They also need to be able to empathise with people undergoing problems related to sleep deprivation.

For the past seven years, Gurney and the sleep therapists at Millpond have also been training NHS staff in dealing with sleep issues. “We have been training all over the country. In that way we can reach people who would not be able to afford to come to us, or where problems are not quite so acute. Wherever we go, we ask health visitors to put up their hands if they have been approached by a parent about a sleep problem in the last week, and almost every hand goes up.”