Dr Anna-Karenia Anderson

Dr Anna-Karenia (AK) Anderson has worked at Shooting Star Children’s Hospice for over 15 years in a joint appointment with the Royal Marsden Hospital as a Consultant in Paediatric Palliative Medicine. In this role she established a specialist paediatric palliative care 24/7 out of hours service and spearheaded the development of a now fully NHS commissioned specialist paediatric palliative care service for Surrey and Southwest London. She is research active, publishing in the areas of phase of illness, surprise question and Fentanyl with ongoing projects on symptom assessment tools and families experience on PICU. She is co-author of two Cochrane reviews on paediatric pain, APPM formulary and PPC guidelines. AK is the local lead for the COPPaR network, a national paediatric palliative care research network.

None of this would have been possible without the early establishment of a Patient and Public Involvement (PPI) users’ group and the active collaboration, passion, and engagement of multi (and inter) disciplinary colleagues across care settings. AK is also the co-chair of the Surrey and Southwest London PPC network (SPAN network).

At the regional level, AK was appointed Palliative and End-of-Life care Children and Young person medical co-lead for the South East Region (PEoLC CYP SE region) in January 2022.

Nationally, AK is the paediatric representative on the NHS England All Ages Palliative and end of life care Clinical excellence workstream and medical representative on the NHS England children, and young people palliative and, end of life Governance group. She is the current chair of the APPM (Association of Paediatric Palliative Medicine). So far in her tenure she has widened the representation of multi-disciplinary colleagues, established several subcommittees (neonatal, trainees and specialist nursing) and created a national paediatric palliative care clinical guidelines group with Cochrane Response support.  She is also an inaugural member of the NIHR pain and palliative group.