Health Economics & Health Technology Assessment [MSc/PgDip/PgCert: Online distance learning] postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

Each morning in the patient transport booking office where I work, I reorganise the day's journeys around cancellations. A dialysis patient whose session moves by an hour can leave a vehicle idle or a crew stretched across two towns, and I have learned that the cheapest-looking schedule on paper is rarely the one that serves the most people well. That everyday problem of deciding how to spend a fixed resource, and on whom, is what has drawn me back towards health economics, the field I first met as an undergraduate and now want to study properly.

I graduated with a 2:1 in Economics. The modules I enjoyed most were microeconomics and applied econometrics, because they asked me to turn messy questions into something I could test. For my dissertation I used publicly available prescribing data to compare spending per registered patient across GP practices in one region. I controlled for list size and the share of patients over 65, using regression in R, and found that a small number of practices sat well above what those factors predicted. I was careful not to call this waste. A practice with more patients managing long-term conditions might spend more for good reasons, and my data could not show outcomes. Recognising that limit was the most useful part of the project, because it showed me that cost on its own says little without some measure of what the money achieves.

That gap is what health technology assessment tries to fill. Since graduating I have read Drummond and colleagues' Methods for the Economic Evaluation of Health Care Programmes, working slowly through the chapters on cost-effectiveness and cost-utility analysis. The idea of the quality-adjusted life year interested me straight away, but so did the debates around it: whether a year of improved health is valued equally regardless of age, and how decision-makers should treat a cost-effectiveness threshold. I have also read several published appraisals from the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, partly to see how economic models are presented and challenged by committees. I would like to understand those models well enough to build and critique them myself, especially decision trees and Markov models, which I have only seen described.

My job has given me practical habits that I think will help. I handle eligibility criteria daily, explaining to callers why some journeys qualify and others do not, which has made me patient with rules that feel unfair to the person affected while still serving a wider purpose. I keep a spreadsheet of recurring cancellation patterns, and last year I suggested grouping two clinics' regular bookings, which my manager adopted and which reduced the number of half-empty vehicles on those routes. It was a small change, but it came from looking at the data rather than reacting to each day separately.

Outside work I am treasurer of a community allotment association. I prepare a simple annual budget, collect plot fees and present accounts at our general meeting, where members argue, reasonably, about whether to spend on a new water tank or lower fees for retired members. Allocating a shared pot among competing claims, transparently, is a modest version of the questions I want to study. I also play five-a-side on Thursday evenings, which has nothing to do with economics but keeps me sane.

Studying online suits my situation. I want to continue working while I study, and I have shown I can manage independent reading alongside shift work. I hope to move into an analyst role supporting commissioning or evidence review within the health service, where I could contribute to decisions about which treatments and services offer good value. I am ready to develop the technical skills that would make that possible, and I bring a grounded sense of how resource decisions land on the people who depend on them.