Michalina Ogejo

Michalina Ogejo was just ten years old when she decided she was going to be a pharmacist. She was fascinated by the kind chemist in her local town in Poland who would make up the syrups that her doctor had prescribed.

Working in pharmacies throughout her degree, Ogejo was ready to hit the ground running when she qualified. Two years into her career in 2013, she moved to England where she learned that every part of the job — from handling prescriptions to patient consultation, and the level of responsibility awarded to the pharmacist — was different from pharmacy in Poland.

Determined to succeed, Ogejo found her feet working at Boots and Superdrug. Then while on maternity leave, she decided to self-fund a prescribing qualification, writing to 20 GP practices before she found one willing to offer supervision. Studying with a small baby “was the scariest jump in her career” but it led to a role in primary care as a medicines optimisation pharmacist.

Ogejo has grown dramatically in her skills and experience over the years, taking on a wide variety of roles, including working as a specialist pain pharmacist as part of a multidisciplinary team in primary care in Nottinghamshire. 

There she showed the dedication for which she is known among her colleagues. Ogejo says: “I had patients with trauma, who’d had difficult experiences in their life but with very limited tools I could use to help. But when patients said to me, I’ve managed to go for a walk and I’ve managed not to take that pill, it was such an amazing feeling.”

In 2023, Ogejo had a patient with trigeminal neuralgia who had been told by four clinicians nothing could be done. She simply asked: “What do you want?” The patient, who also had multiple sclerosis, explained that her son with special needs made very high-pitched noises that triggered intense and debilitating pain attacks. She just wanted to lessen their frequency.

Ogejo ended up calling a specialist London clinic for advice. They wrote her a protocol and the patient went from five attacks per week to three. “It was a massive learning curve. I made links with maxillofacial specialists, with dentists and neurologists and the Trigeminal Neuralgia Association granted me membership on the work I had been doing,” she explains. 

She wouldn’t have been able to rest until she had solved the problem: “I’m quite persistent. I will just call until people will speak to me.”

After a stint at the Lincolnshire Integrated Care Board (ICB), leading a team of nine pharmacists and pharmacy technicians, working on issues such as improving green inhaler use and policy development, Ogejo is now lead clinical pharmacist at NEMS Community Benefit Services, a not-for-profit social enterprise that provides urgent primary care and GP out-of-hours services across Nottinghamshire.

Since April 2024, she has already placed her unique stamp on the new role. This included developing new standard operating procedures for use of human normal immunoglobulin for measles exposure, liaising with providers and the UK Health Security Agency. 

Our judges were won over by Ogejo’s “clear drive to excel in her professional development”. 

In the past 12 months, she has also undertaken a project to improve the prescribing safety of direct oral anticoagulation medicines and reduce the use of premium-priced generics at Lincolnshire ICB and NEMS. Her nominee cited her “excellent leadership” that has led to “significant improvements in clinical outcomes and cost savings”.

The patient is always at the forefront of her mind. Ogejo says: “I’ve always been passionate about personalised care, even in urgent care where there is a perception we cannot do that too much because of the time pressure. But we need to communicate with patients about their medicines or they will keep coming back.”

When developing an information leaflet that could be given for both deep vein thrombosis and pulmonary embolism, she says: “The final touch was to sit with a patient in the waiting room for five minutes and ask for their honest opinion [about the leaflet]. I’m always the one in the meeting arguing for us to be more patient-focused.”

Outside of work, Ogejo channels her creativity into writing children’s books, combining her love for storytelling with her commitment to health education. She has published one so far and is working on several others in Polish and English, testing them on her now six-year-old.

Already thinking of her next project, Ogejo has set her sights on community outreach education programmes, starting with childhood asthma. She has identified health inequalities and communication barriers as significant challenges in achieving better asthma outcomes, especially among non-English speaking families. 

 “My dream is to hold an event maybe with a primary care network, working with schools in the deprived areas of Nottingham, with nurses and pharmacists, with T-shirts that say, ‘talk to me about asthma’, but in different languages.”

She understands what it must be like to have a seriously ill child but not know what is happening with their care. She says: “Even if you’re only reaching small numbers, it could make a massive difference.”

• Meet the rest of The Pharmaceutical Journal’s Women to Watch 2024 here

• This article was amended on 9 December 2024 to correct a spelling error and more accurately reflect the timeline of Ogejo’s career