Applied Ethics and the Professions (Biomedical and Health Ethics), MA postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

On the ward where I work as a clerk, a whiteboard by the nurses' station lists every bed, the patient's expected discharge date and a coloured magnet showing whether transport, medication or a social care package is still outstanding. My job is to keep that board accurate, answer the phone and direct visitors. Over two years I have noticed how much ethical weight sits on small administrative decisions: who is moved to a side room, which relative is told what over the phone, how long a medically fit patient waits for a care home place while someone in A&E waits for their bed. None of these choices is mine, but I see them being made, and I want the philosophical training to think about them properly.

My undergraduate degree in philosophy gave me a grounding in moral theory and political philosophy, and I chose options in bioethics and the philosophy of mind. My dissertation examined whether it is fair for access to publicly funded IVF to depend on criteria such as age, body mass index and whether a partner already has children. I compared a broadly utilitarian account of rationing, focused on maximising health gain from limited budgets, with Norman Daniels's argument that health care matters because it protects fair equality of opportunity. I argued that some eligibility criteria could be defended as proxies for likely success, but that the existing-child rule was harder to justify on either view, since it tracks a family's circumstances rather than clinical benefit. My supervisor's main criticism was that I treated 'fairness' too abstractly, and that comment is part of why I took the job I now have: I wanted to understand how such principles meet real constraints.

Working as a ward clerk is not clinical work, and I am careful not to overstate what I know about medicine. What it has given me is close familiarity with the practical texture of a hospital: confidentiality rules applied to an anxious son at the desk, the language of 'bed pressures', and the way decisions are distributed across nurses, doctors, discharge coordinators and families. I have become interested in delayed discharge as an ethical question as much as a logistical one. When an elderly patient no longer needs hospital care but cannot safely go home, the interests of that patient, the next patient and the wider system pull in different directions, and the patient's own preferences can be lost among them. I would like to study how theories of autonomy, particularly relational accounts that treat people's choices as shaped by their relationships and circumstances, might help here.

Alongside work I have kept reading. Beauchamp and Childress's Principles of Biomedical Ethics was the core text of my undergraduate module, and rereading it with some experience behind me has made me more sympathetic to its usefulness and more aware of how often its four principles conflict without telling you how to weigh them. I have also been reading about the ethics of care, which seems closer to what I see on the ward than rights-based approaches alone.

Outside the hospital, I help run a weekly chess club for older adults at our local library. I set up the boards, keep a simple ladder and partner newcomers with regulars. It is ordinary and enjoyable, and it has shown me how much people value being treated as competent and taken seriously, something I suspect is relevant to debates about capacity and dignity, though I would not claim more than that.

I am applying for postgraduate study in biomedical and health ethics because I want to combine rigorous argument with attention to how institutions actually work. I am a careful reader, I write clearly, and I am used to keeping detailed information accurate under pressure. In the longer term I hope to work in clinical ethics support, research governance or health policy, where I could help make the reasoning behind difficult decisions more transparent to the people they affect.