Neonatal nursing postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

I qualified as a children's nurse eighteen months ago and now work on a general paediatric ward that takes babies from a few weeks old upwards. The infants are the patients I think about most on the way home: the bronchiolitis admissions in winter, the ex-premature babies back with feeding difficulties, the parents who have already spent weeks in a neonatal unit and arrive knowing the language of oxygen saturations and NG tubes better than some of my colleagues. Caring for those families has pushed me towards the specialism rather than away from it, and postgraduate study in neonatal nursing is the route I want to take next.

My undergraduate degree gave me the foundations I am now building on. My dissertation was a literature review on parental involvement in infant feeding during hospital admission, and it changed how I read the evidence base. I had expected clear answers and instead found a set of small, heterogeneous studies with inconsistent outcome measures, several relying on self-reported feeding volumes. Learning to say honestly what the literature could and could not support was more useful than any single finding. It also introduced me to work on family-centred care and to the principle, central in neonatal practice, that parents are not visitors to their baby's care but participants in it. I would like to study that in far more depth, alongside the physiology I currently understand only at the level a general ward requires: thermoregulation in the very preterm infant, respiratory adaptation, the pharmacology of drugs dosed by the kilogram and the fraction.

On the ward I have taken on the responsibilities that come with a first registered post and a little experience. I supervise second-year students on their medicines rounds, and I volunteered to become one of our link nurses for feeding support, which mostly means keeping the expressing equipment audited, checking that our written information is current and reminding the team, tactfully, that a mother who has just been told her baby needs another night of nasogastric feeds may not want a leaflet at that moment. I have completed my trust's assessments in paediatric early warning scores and safeguarding level three. I am realistic that a neonatal unit would ask me to learn a great deal again from the beginning, particularly around ventilated infants and the confidence to handle babies of under a kilogram, and I would rather begin that learning with the structure of a taught programme behind me.

Two things outside nursing have shaped how I work. Through my degree I kept a weekend job at a supermarket customer service desk, dealing with refunds, lost cards and people whose days had gone wrong before they reached me. It taught me to keep my voice steady and to explain a decision clearly, which transfers directly to conversations with anxious relatives. I also help at a junior swimming club on Saturday mornings, teaching the youngest group. Getting a nervous six-year-old to put their face in the water requires patience and very small steps, and I was pleased to be asked last year to take over planning the sessions for that group and to write the simple skills checklist the other helpers now use.

I want this study to be practical as well as academic: to read research carefully, to understand why a unit's guideline says what it says, and to be a nurse the parents in a neonatal bay can trust with the most detailed questions they have. That is the reason I am applying now, while the paediatric experience I have is fresh and my appetite for the underlying science is strong.

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