Health Informatics, MAS postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

Most mornings at the outpatient booking desk where I work, I find at least one patient who appears to exist twice. Usually it is a small thing: a hyphen added to a surname, a postcode typed with a missing space, a date of birth with day and month swapped. The two records look like different people to the system, so letters go to one and results attach to the other. My job is to flag these for the records team rather than merge them myself, but I have started keeping a tally of the causes. Over several months the pattern has been consistent. Most duplicates begin at registration, when someone is in a hurry and the form accepts almost anything. That observation is the main reason I want to study health informatics: I would like to understand how clinical information systems can be designed so that ordinary, busy people enter data correctly the first time.

I studied Biomedical Science at Cardiff and graduated with a 2:1. The modules I enjoyed most were in physiology and laboratory methods, but my dissertation took a less expected direction. I used a publicly available, anonymised diabetes dataset to look at how often blood glucose and HbA1c values were recorded in mixed units. Some entries used mmol/mol and others percentages, with no field indicating which. I wrote rules in Excel, and later in R, to identify values that were implausible for their apparent unit, and I compared summary statistics before and after cleaning. The differences were large enough that conclusions drawn from the raw file could have been misleading. My supervisor encouraged me to write about how the problem might have been prevented, which led me to read about data standards such as HL7 FHIR and coding systems like SNOMED CT. I understand these only at an introductory level, but they showed me that much of what I had been fixing by hand is a design question.

Since graduating I have tried to build practical skills alongside my job. I have worked through an online SQL course and practised by building a small database of my own reading and running logs, writing queries to answer questions I actually had. I am now learning basic Python. At work I have also become the person colleagues ask when the booking spreadsheet for a new clinic needs dropdown lists or validation rules. Restricting a field to a set of clinic codes reduced the errors we passed on to the next team, and it was satisfying to see a minor change make a whole shift calmer.

The booking role has taught me things a course could not. I speak to patients who are anxious, confused by letters or hard of hearing, and I see how much depends on a correct phone number or a properly recorded interpreter need. I have learned to be patient with systems as well as people, to report problems clearly, and to respect the boundaries of my role, particularly around confidentiality.

Outside work I volunteer once a month at a repair café, where I mostly fix lamps and the occasional kettle. It has nothing to do with healthcare, but it suits my temperament: someone brings in an object that has stopped working, and the useful thing is to trace the fault patiently rather than guess. I also run with a local club on Thursday evenings.

At postgraduate level I hope to gain a structured grounding in health data standards, database design, analytics and the ethics of handling patient information, together with an understanding of how technology is introduced into clinical settings without adding to staff workload. I would like eventually to work on the side of information systems that meets the public and frontline staff, such as registration, scheduling and records quality, where I already know the problems first-hand. I bring careful habits with data, a scientific background, and real experience of how hospital information is created and used day to day.