Dr Lorna Pender is a patient advocate and self-employed patient engagement professional. Dr Pender has a background in acute and emergency medicine and has been focusing on global medical affairs and patient engagement for the past eight years. Dr Pender launched the co-created NAVIGATE project last year to aid the navigation of the rare diseases community to early access to medicine programmes. Dr Pender has lived with severe alopecia since age eight and has had access to re-purposed medicines, and she is a patient expert at St John’s Institute of Dermatology patient expert board. Dr Pender has published her alopecia patient experience in the British Medical Journal.
