Health Informatics (UCL/UoM Joint Award) MSc/PGDip/PGCert postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

The repeat prescription requests that reach the community pharmacy where I work as a dispensing assistant arrive in at least four ways: through the NHS App, by email from a care home, on paper slips handed over the counter, and as phone messages written on a pad by whoever answered. Each route carries slightly different information, and part of my job is reconciling them before a pharmacist checks the final item. After two years doing this, I have become more interested in why the information arrives in such different shapes than in the individual errors I catch. That interest is what draws me to postgraduate study in health informatics.

My degree was in psychology at Leeds, where I graduated with a 2:1. The modules I enjoyed most were research methods and cognitive psychology, particularly work on attention and how people interpret forms and displays. My dissertation analysed around six hundred anonymised free-text comments from a patient feedback survey shared by a local GP practice. Working with a supervisor, I built a coding frame, tested it against a second coder on a sample of comments, and revised categories where our agreement was poor. The most common complaint was not waiting times but uncertainty: patients did not know whether a request had been received. I did not solve anything, but the project taught me how much careful structure qualitative data needs before it can inform a decision, and how easily a category can hide the thing it was meant to capture.

At the pharmacy, I see a practical version of the same problem. Because I was comfortable with spreadsheets, the manager asked me to keep a simple log of owed items, medicines we could not supply in full, so staff on different shifts could see what was outstanding. I designed it with columns everyone agreed on, and within a few months fewer patients were phoning to ask about missing items twice. It was a small tool, and I am aware that a shared spreadsheet is not a clinical system, but designing something that tired people would actually fill in at the end of a busy day taught me more about usability than any lecture did.

Outside work, I help my grandmother manage her medication online. She has a smartphone but finds the layered menus difficult, so we sat down together and wrote a short paper guide in her own words. Watching her use it showed me that digital access depends on people as much as on software. I also coach a junior badminton session on Saturday mornings, which has nothing to do with health data but has made me better at explaining things simply and adjusting when an explanation is not landing.

To prepare for the technical side of the course, I have been working through an introductory Python course in the evenings and practising basic SQL queries on open datasets. I have read about interoperability standards such as HL7 FHIR and about the principles behind SNOMED CT, though I understand them at an introductory level rather than as someone who has implemented them. I have also followed public discussion of the NHS's use of shared care records, which has made me think about the trade-offs between making information available to clinicians and protecting patient confidentiality.

I want to study health informatics because I think the next stage of my development needs both formal grounding in data, standards and information governance, and the chance to study how systems are evaluated. I would bring an understanding of frontline work, a research background in coding messy human information, and a habit of building things that colleagues can use. In the longer term I would like to work on the design and evaluation of patient-facing services, where the gap between what a system records and what a patient understands is still too wide.