Are Compounded Medications Safe for Children?

Are compounded medications safe for children? For many parents, one of the biggest concerns when it comes to treating their child is the safety of medication, and particularly the safety of compounded medicine. It’s a valid concern, and the good news is that compounding pharmacies in Australia are held to high standards to ensure that every product made for children is as safe and effective as possible.

This fact sheet explains:

Compounding Pharmacies Follow Strict Guidelines

Compounded medicines are made by trained pharmacists to meet a specific patient’s needs. In Australia, compounding pharmacies are regulated by national and state health authorities. These regulators set out clear rules and standards to ensure patient safety and product quality.

At our pharmacy, we take these responsibilities seriously. We operate in a dedicated compounding facility with highly trained staff who use pharmaceutical-grade ingredients and sterile processes to prepare each medicine with precision and care.

Custom-Made Medicines Can Be Safer for Children

Commercial medications often contain preservatives, artificial colours, or other additives that may not be suitable for all children, especially those with allergies or sensitivities. One of the biggest advantages of compounding is that we can remove unnecessary ingredients and create a formulation that’s tailored specifically for your child.

For example, we can:

  1. Make a preservative-free version of a medication
  2. Remove colourings or flavourings that may cause reactions
  3. Create a liquid suspension if your child struggles to swallow tablets

This makes the medication easier to take and often more effective, simply because it’s designed around your child’s needs.

Dosage Is Adjusted Specifically for Your Child

Children aren’t just small adults. Child-friendly medication needs to be dosed carefully based on their weight and health status. Our pharmacists work closely with your child’s doctor or paediatrician to ensure that the dosage is appropriate and safe.

Before any medicine is made, we thoroughly check:

  • That the prescribed ingredients are suitable for the child
  • That the dosage is correct for their weight and age
  • That the formulation is appropriate in both form and function

These checks are an essential part of our compounding process and help ensure that your child receives the right medicine, at the right dose, in the right format.

Collaboration with Your Child’s Doctor

Because each compounded medication is made for an individual child, we often work closely with doctors and paediatricians. This open communication helps us clarify prescriptions, adjust formulations, and ensure that the final product supports the child’s treatment in the best way possible.

Our team values these relationships and works hard to build trust and transparency with healthcare providers, so you can feel confident that your child is receiving care that is collaborative and thorough.

So, Are Compounded Medications Safe for Children?

Knowing that your child’s medication has been made by expert pharmacists in a regulated environment — using high-quality ingredients and precise processes — can offer peace of mind. Compounded medicines are not just personalised; they are prepared with the highest standards of safety and care.

Whether your child has allergies, needs a unique dose, or struggles with certain types of medication, compounded medicine may be the right solution.

For more information about medicine for babies and children, check out this resource here.


This fact sheet was written by Matt Bellgrove, Founder and pharmacist at National Custom Compounding.


Video Transcript

It’s a really great question. And being a dad of four kids, I absolutely understand why parents out there are worried about the safety of medication in kids, and especially the safety of medication in compounded medicines for kids.

So point one is compounding pharmacies have to follow quite strict and stringent guidelines. And these guidelines are under an Australian government regulator as well as state-based health regulators. So there’s lots of regulation, which means when compounding pharmacies do things for the right reasons and for our patients, the product that we make is of the highest quality that can be.

And then it also comes down to our facility as well. We take great pride in what we do here, and because of that, our team is very expert in what we’re doing. And when it comes to handling a formula for a child or a medicine for a child, the whole team takes that with the utmost of care.

So the thing that can often be beneficial is that if a child is taking a medicine and one of the ingredients in a commercial medicine may not be suitable, or they might have an allergy, a compounding pharmacy like us can actually make it safer. So we can make a suspension without a preservative or without a colouring agent that a commercial product already has. And that means when the kids take our version of that compounded formula, the product is actually more suitable for that child when taking it because we’ve made the formula just for them.

The other key thing that all pharmacists do in our jobs across normal pharmacy and compounding pharmacy is check things like dosages as appropriate to the weight of the child. So that’s just another step that our team here of pharmacists undertakes to make sure that when a formula is being created for a specific child, that everything in it is safe, that the ingredients in it are safe, the dosage requested by the doctor is safe. And we’ll always make that one of the very first things we do before the formulation gets underway in our labs.

We work closely with doctors and paediatricians as well. Because compounding medicine is unique and we’re making one formula for one child, it actually then allows us to develop really strong relationships with these key healthcare practitioners. And it means that with really open communication, paediatricians are quite willing to chat to compounding pharmacists about concerns or feedback in terms of formulation preparation and prescriptions that might have been supplied.

So you can have a real level of trust in compounding pharmacists that we can go to great lengths, and we do go to great lengths, to make sure that what we’re doing for your kids is absolutely safe. Once the product’s been made to the highest standard, it means that the end compounding formula has been personally made for that child. So it should put it in a really good place to help them with whatever they need while taking it.