Clinical Pharmacy and Research MSc postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

On Tuesday I spent ten minutes asking an eighty-year-old man about the word 'penicillin' on his red allergy wristband. He remembered being sick after medicine for an ear infection when he was about six, and his mother telling him never to take it again. Nausea is a common side effect rather than an allergy, but the label had followed him for decades, and that morning it meant his chest infection was being treated with an alternative antibiotic. I documented his account clearly and passed it to the medical team. Whether the label is removed is not my decision, but the conversation raised a question I keep returning to: how much of what sits in a patient's record has ever been checked, and how would we measure the effect of checking it properly?

I qualified as a pharmacist eighteen months ago and work in a rotational post at a district general hospital. My current rotation is care of the elderly, where much of my day is medicines reconciliation for new admissions: comparing GP records, the patient's own supply and what the patient or family tell me. I have become good at spotting the gaps. A dose changed in clinic but never updated by the surgery, or a daughter who has quietly stopped giving her father his evening tablet because he falls asleep before it. I enjoy this detective work, but I am aware that I usually resolve each discrepancy one patient at a time. I want the skills to step back and ask whether the system producing these discrepancies can be studied and improved.

My only formal research so far was my final-year MPharm project. With a supervisor, I assessed inhaler technique among forty fellow students using placebo metered-dose and dry powder devices, scoring each step against a checklist before and after a short demonstration. It was a modest study, and the participants were young, healthy and familiar with healthcare language, so I could not generalise to patients. Still, it taught me how much effort goes into a reliable checklist, how two observers can score the same breath differently, and how easily a small sample tempts you to overstate a result. I wrote my limitations section with more care than any other part of the report, and I would approach a clinical study with that same caution.

Since qualifying, I have tried to read beyond protocols. Working through Ben Goldacre's 'Bad Pharma' made me more alert to how trial design and selective publication shape the evidence I rely on when I check a dose, and I have started attending our hospital's monthly journal club, where I presented a paper on deprescribing in older adults. Preparing it showed me how little I yet understand about statistics, especially confidence intervals and how outcomes are chosen. A structured postgraduate course combining clinical pharmacy with research methods would address exactly that gap, alongside deepening my therapeutics in areas such as renal dosing and polypharmacy that I meet every week.

Outside work, I share an allotment with my sister, sing alto in a community choir and help run a Saturday chess club for children at our local library. None of these is about medicines, but the chess club has made me better at explaining an idea in two or three ways until one lands, which is not so different from counselling a patient on a new inhaler.

I am applying because I want my practice to rest on evidence I can evaluate for myself, and eventually to contribute to it. I would like to be the pharmacist who not only questions a penicillin label on one ward, but can design a sound project to find out how many labels like it there are, and what happens when we look.