Gerontological nursing postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

I qualified as an adult nurse two years ago and have spent almost all of that time caring for older people, largely because that is who occupies the beds on a general medical ward. What began as the ordinary work of my rota has become the part of nursing I want to understand properly. Roughly two thirds of my patients are over seventy-five, many with several long-term conditions, and the clinical reasoning they require is different in kind, not just in degree, from the acute pathways I was taught to follow. A postgraduate course in gerontological nursing would give me the evidence base and the theoretical language for judgements I currently make on instinct and borrowed experience.

My final-year dissertation was a literature review on delirium screening in acute medical settings. I expected to find a straightforward gap between guidance and practice; what struck me instead was how much of the published work described screening as a documentation task rather than a clinical conversation. The 4AT is quick, but it only helps if someone knows what the patient was like a fortnight ago, and that information usually sits with a daughter on the end of a phone. Writing that review changed how I hand over. I now try to record a short baseline of function and cognition from whoever knows the person best, and I have found that colleagues use it when they are deciding whether confusion is new.

On the ward I have set up a weekly newspaper-reading group in the day room, which costs nothing beyond a copy of the local paper and forty minutes of my break time on a Thursday. Six to eight patients usually come. I started it after noticing how many people sat in chairs facing a television nobody was watching, and because I wanted to see for myself whether the arguments I had read about deconditioning and sensory under-stimulation held up in front of me. They largely do. Patients who say very little during observations will talk at length about a story on the letters page, and I have twice heard a discharge-relevant concern about stairs or shopping raised there before it appeared in any assessment. Keeping the group going has taught me about the unglamorous side of nursing innovation: rotas, ward-manager permission, and the fact that a good idea dies if only one person owns it, so I have shown two healthcare assistants how to run it without me.

I also take occasional bank shifts in a nursing home. The contrast with the acute ward is instructive. There, continuity is the asset and specialist medical input the scarcity; on my ward it is the reverse. Seeing both has made me more careful about transfers of care, particularly medicines information and the wording of discharge summaries, which residents' families often rely on more than we assume.

Alongside work I have been reading around the subject at my own pace, including Atul Gawande's Being Mortal, which pushed me to think about what patients are willing to trade for what, and more recently into the frailty and comprehensive geriatric assessment literature. I am aware that my reading is uneven, chosen by curiosity rather than structure, and that is part of why I want formal study: to test my assumptions against research methods I can properly appraise.

In the longer term I would like to work in a frailty or older people's assessment service, and eventually to help develop practice in an acute trust rather than only deliver it. Study alongside continued clinical work suits me; my ward shifts will keep supplying the questions. I am ready to be taught why some of my current answers are wrong.

Review this personal statement

Latest reviews