Scholarship / the idea of a solitary 'hero' leader reinstated with an engaging leadership - Chevening Skills Essay [5]

Chevening Leadership Skills Essay

Hi ! I am applying for the Chevening scholarship for the first time and I would really appreciate your comment on my essay. I have exceeded the 500-word count limit by 110 words. I want to make this impressive but if there is anything in the essay that you think I should omit or doesnt show leadership skills, kindly do let me know. I would also appreciate any guide on how to end the essay. Thanks in advance!

In the multifaceted and dynamic world of healthcare, the idea of a solitary 'hero' leader has been reinstated with an engaging leadership model, whereby everyone in the team plays an important leadership role and is equally accountable for the team performance. Leaders are not merely individuals with leadership titles, but more importantly, individuals with leadership skills in their practice. Leadership is influence, nothing more, nothing less. In demonstrating leadership skills, a leader needs to have initiative. In a recent fire tragedy that hit a local general hospital leading to six fatalities, majority of patients were immediately evacuated and transferred in to the hospital where I currently work. Foreseeing there will be an influx of patients; I made a good judgment and volunteered myself to be the pharmacist-on-standby within a short notice. On that weekend after my shift, I had gathered a few colleagues to come help the pharmacy staff in the affected hospital with transferring and rearranging drugs and consumables as most of the pharmacy units had to be closed for safety reasons.

Leaders need not be flawless. A particular incident taught me an invaluable lesson which helped shaped me to be a better pharmacist. On my first week of duty as the Lead Pharmacist in the Oncology Outpatient Pharmacy, a trainee pharmacist under my supervision had mistakenly committed a medication error. Even though the medication was yet to be administered and the patient was unharmed, a medication error is still a huge taboo and disgrace to the pharmacy profession. However, as the lead pharmacist and his supervisor, I had taken ownership over the matter and conducted a root-cause- analysis of the event as well as contacted and initiated a formal visit and apology to the patient and his family. Since then, I had implemented governance and ownership strategies to ensure patient safety and standard compliance in the pharmacy. Despite the negative pressure I was in, I was positively resilient and regained the confidence of my peers and patients and raised the pharmacy profile. This is evident by the number of consultations I had received over the years from oncologists, nurses, fellow pharmacy staff and pharmacists from other hospitals. A service satisfaction survey carried out in the same year had shown positive response, in which over 98% of outpatient cancer patients were very satisfied with the service I had provided in the oncology pharmacy.

As an oncology ward pharmacist, I work very closely with physicians, nurses, cancer patients and allied health professionals. With the emerge of new cancer therapies, complex chemotherapy protocols, multidrug use and co-morbidities in elderly patients and recruitment of new oncology physicians and nurses, I have helped to improve patient safety and outcome by influencing the medication prescribing patterns, disseminating drug information, providing staff training and education such as talks on safe handling of hazardous cytotoxic drugs to pharmacists and nurses, and directly interacting and counseling cancer patients and caretakers on chemotherapy. As the public is big on alternative cancer therapies and most of my patients speak Chinese with little Bahasa Malaysia proficiency, I had taken part-time locum job in a retail pharmacy and Chinese language class in order to better communicate with my patients.

Aside from being an oncology ward pharmacist, I also co-run an anticoagulation clinic with other pharmacists, but being the sole certified anticoagulant-trained pharmacist, I have developed standard operating procedures, supervised training for newly recruited anticoagulant pharmacists and monitored their and the clinic's progress. In the initial stage of the pharmacist-managed anticoagulation clinic, it received mixed response and poor support from the medical consultant, but it has now received written approval and more referrals from the Medical Head of Department in our hospital.