September 2026
What is your role?
My name is Nanna and I am the Chief Children's Pharmacist, so I look after everything medicines related at Evelina London.
I work with my team of about 40 technicians and pharmacists to make sure every patient gets the best and safest medicines possible.
What made you want to work in pharmacy?
When I was a child my mum had this blue box with medicines and whenever I wasn't feeling well she pulled something out that made me feel better – I found that endlessly fascinating. I also really enjoyed science, and after working in our local pharmacy as a summer job, the decision to study pharmacy had kind of made itself.
I studied in Germany (I grew up in Hamburg) but moved over to the UK for part of my pre-registration year to work in a hospital. Hospital pharmacists in the UK work much more clinically and as part of the multidisciplinary team, which really interested me.
Right after graduating, I got my first job in the same hospital and rotated through a number of different areas, one of which was paediatrics. It quickly was clear to me that I had found my little corner – as a pharmacist, working with children really challenges you. Often we have to think a bit outside the box as a lot of medicines are not licensed in children so formulations and supporting data is often not straight forward – it challenges you to find solutions for your patients.
When I first arrived, I wanted to stay for 2 or 3 years. 26 years later I am still here and loving it.
How long have you worked for Evelina London and what is your favourite part of working here?
I came to Evelina London in September 2018. It is such a nice place to work – it didn't take long at all for it to feel like home.
The people here are amazing and there is a clear focus on having the child at the centre of what we do. I feel very grateful that I spend my time at work with such dedicated colleagues. In 2025 we won the Clinigen Love Your Pharmacist – Team of the Year Award, which was a great recognition of what we do and how we do it.
Clinically, we see a lot of really specialist and unusual cases, which is often challenging and there is not a dull moment!
What does the pharmacy team do?
Today our pharmacists and technicians are involved in every stage of a child's care. Many are independent prescribers, researchers, educators and specialists in an area. Pharmacy is about much more than medicines supply. We help design safer systems, support innovation and improve patient outcomes.
We have a dispensary for in and outpatients that has just been refurbished and now has a robot that can select, retrieve and deliver medicines to us in seconds, helping us work more efficiently.
Our team of clinical pharmacists and technicians are on the wards every day, clinically screening all the medicines prescribed, ensuring they're all correct and delivered in a formulation which is easy to take and appropriate to the child's age.
We also supply patients going home or coming to the clinics with their medicine, so we are always working directly with families to ensure they know how to manage their medicines and answer any questions they might have.
We also run a service called 'pill school'. Liquid medicine may seem the obvious choice for children, but they aren't always most appropriate so we help them to learn to swallow pills!
Our specialist pharmacists work with individual specialist teams to support them with anything related to medicines, such as guideline development, bringing new medicines on our formulary and answering their questions. A lot of the pharmacists are also prescribers and some of them run their own clinics.
The pharmacy team manages the South East London formulary, which has all the information about how we use drugs in paediatrics – indications, doses, administration and more. It is a lot of work, especially as so many of the drugs we use are unlicensed. The information we collate is used across the UK and worldwide (!) due to its specialist nature.
As Evelina London runs so many clinical trials, we have a dedicated clinical trials team and many of us are involved in research or are doing our own research.
Working at a teaching hospital, we do a lot of education and training – within the hospital but also externally through courses we run or national organisations that we are involved with. Quite a few of us work with national organisations to improve medicines for children and occasionally we have colleagues from other countries visit us to see how we work.
Behind the scenes, we do a lot around managing all the risks that come with using medicines. Whether it be how we store, prepare, prescribe or administer them, we're always looking at incidents we have with medicine and working to ensure our systems are as safe as possible.
What do you find exciting about your work?
One of the most exciting parts of my role is helping shape how pharmacy services evolve, from introducing new technology and automation to designing safer ways of prescribing medicines
Because of all the specialities we have here, we see lots of new drug developments for children and a big part of my job is making sure these are made available to patients.
The future of medicine for children is really exciting, not only are more specialist medicines being developed with children in mind, but there is also an impressive pipeline of gene therapy medicines developing. A few of years ago I was involved in the implementation of the first commissioned gene therapy for children at Evelina London and these medicines looks really promising.
What is your proudest moment?
I am still immensely proud of becoming a consultant pharmacist, but what gives me the greatest satisfaction now is seeing colleagues develop into future leaders and knowing that the improvements we make today will benefit children and families for years to come.
I felt privileged to have attended a Royal Garden Party. My colleagues kindly nominated me to attend and I am so pleased that they wanted to show their appreciation for my work in this way.
Thank you to the children and young people who have so brilliantly illustrated our blog pages.