Graduate / SOP for Clinical (Biomed) Engineering Masters [4]

Hello lovely editors,
This is a statement of interest for a clinical engineering/masters of health sciences degree. No instructions given - there's no word limit, but I'm really hoping to shorten it! As of now it's a little under 2 pages. Cleaning up of any weird sentences, comments, etc. are very welcome. Thanks in advance.

___________________________________________________________________

After reading yet another incident describing an infusion pump over-delivering medication to a patient, I began to feel that my coding scheme of applicable versus not applicable was overly simplistic. I had just started my 16-month internship with the XXX team at the XXX, and was scanning an incident report database for narratives relevant to the topic of multiple intravenous infusion errors. Comparable to several incident reports before it, the pump's infusion rate had been entered incorrectly at the point of care. Perhaps a decimal point had been inserted in the wrong place, an extra digit added, or a mistake made in the nurse's mental arithmetic. This type of human error anecdote was familiar to me from my study of human factors, but what struck me most was that, unlike most situations where there would be a simple resolution, errors made in the clinical environment often resulted in a fatal outcome. This introduction to the XXX's research instilled in me the severe consequences of 'human errors' in healthcare, and the profound impact of usability design in medical tools and devices on patient safety. Later in my co-op when I was involved in conducting usability and heuristic evaluations, I would recall these narratives and grasp the full impact of informed design decisions. From these experiences, I confirmed my interest in developing and improving technology in healthcare, or in other words, clinical engineering.

My internship with the XXX team reinforced my passion for user-centered design, but my fascination for human factors was sparked much earlier while studying at the XXX. I was motivated to transfer into Industrial Engineering after my first year in Engineering Science, especially after researching the human factors component of the degree. I had realized early on in my first year that Engineering Science was not a strong fit for me: I was eager to start specializing, and another year of broad foundation courses was not appealing. From my first introductory course on the subject, it quickly became apparent that streaming in human factors had been the right decision for me. Approaches for how to design anything, in any industry, better suited to the people interacting with it just made sense to me.

It also became evident that tackling challenges in healthcare would be a consistent theme of my degree. In my third year, our physical ergonomics design project was to create an assistive device for the elderly. To reduce bathing accidents, my team and I decided to design an ergonomic assistive bath chair. We were the only team to build a functional miniature model of our design, which featured an elevating and rotating seat operated by hydraulics. Consequently, I took the initiative to perform usability evaluations of the chair's keypad-based control interface, using a paper control and simulating the response with the miniature chair. I was surprised to see how enlightening a simple mock-up testing could be in identifying what changes needed to be made to the prototype. Followed by a course in interface design, my group and I again focused on healthcare for our project, where we designed a decision support tool for emergency physicians during triage. These projects oriented to healthcare technology were influential in motivating me to pursue an internship with the XXX team for my professional experience year.

During the course of my work at the XXX, I had the pleasure of working with engineers and researchers of diverse backgrounds. It was from my discussions with many of them, and especially with past and present students of the clinical engineering program, that shaped my decision to apply for clinical engineering. Amongst the many engaging projects I had the opportunity to be involved with while at the XXX, working with a masters student on her clinical thesis stands out as one of my most challenging assignments. The thesis project was a multi-site observational study, with the goal of analyzing clinician communication technology use around the process of patient transfer from the emergency department to general internal medicine. I became engrossed in the project as the lead researcher at the XXX site, and as the secondary observer at XXX. I contributed to the high level analysis of information technology use at all three sites, and completed my own appendix on the XXX data. This allowed me to fully understand the context of technology use in healthcare, and how strongly context can affect the adoption or efficiency of a tool. Additionally, it solidified my understanding of the XXX clinical engineering program, and confirmed for me that it greatly matched my research interests.

I plan to continue in this vein of work in my fourth year research thesis, on RFID enabled intelligent notification for physicians, and by completing my minor in Bioengineering. I also hope to learn new perspectives on the subject from the Healthcare Systems course. I believe this will lead well into continuing my research interests in the IBBME clinical program with its unique focus on designing for the clinical setting. It would be an honour to continue working with Dr. XXX, Dr. XXX, and Dr. XXX on their research at the XXX.

With the completion of my undergraduate degree, I will have learned how to think about the challenges that are presented in healthcare and ways to overcomes them from the perspectives of human factors and operations research. I want to broaden the perspectives and the tools I can use to approach the design and improvement of the medical field and its technology. Healthcare is strongly technology-mediated, and the consequences of technology design are palpable. I want to be involved in reducing the likelihood of incidents occurring to increase patient safety. I believe this, along with my research interests, experience, and academic background, make me a strong fit for the clinical engineering masters program at XXX.