Reflective Skills Assessment

Ability to communicate clearly and succinctly both orally and written

Within my first month of placement at the department of Health, I was given a technical report on
the ban on smoking in public places that is used in the graduate recruitment process of the GES. The
report was given to me along with a task that is also set during the graduate recruitment process, to
provide two short reports, one technical and one non-technical, and to present the non-technical
report to my team orally.
This task was given to me to assess my ability to correctly understand the intended audience of my
work to adapt it as such. For example some colleagues do not require all the technical details of a
project and would much rather have a short succinct version.
The deadline of this task was a week, after which I would submit my two reports to all team
members then orally present the non-technical piece. The feedback of my two reports was generally
positive, highlighting that I had successfully targeted key areas to highlight to both target audiences
of the two reports.
The feedback of my oral report was not as positive, during my presentation it was noted that I often
used statistics as a way of feeling comfortable given my mathematical academic background
however this was not optimal when presenting to colleagues who require a non-technical
presentation. My line manager suggested that I used statistics and technical terms as I thought I
wasnt been taken seriously without them.
As a result of this my line manager and myself suggested that I work on lowering the use statistics
and overly complicated technical terms when they werent needed by having weekly one o one
sessions in which we would discuss the work I had completed that week but in a non-technical
manner.
After working on this for some weeks I soon became very comfortable presenting to senior
colleagues without the need to use statistics or technical terms to seem professional enough to be
taken seriously. This work culminating in my end of year presentation to all other students within
the Department of Health, in which I was able to convey the full project I had been working on in
within my 10 minute slot without leaving anyone baffled.
The skill of being able to identify and cater work for a target audience is something that I have
developed over this placement and will be very useful in future. If this situation arises again I would
use the same method I did for my final presentation, to first write the piece as if it is for someone in
a similar position as myself, both in terms of technical knowledge and seniority, then adapt the piece
to the exact target audience.

Having a planned, organised and structured approach to tasks

When I began my placement, my line manager asked that I initially keep a full log of all work that I
completed and then after a few weeks we would look at whether this system worked for keeping me
focused and organised on all relevant projects.
My line manager was of the opinion that if I was incredibly organised that this would be second
nature and if I wasnt it would teach me to be organised and help it become second nature to ensure
that I do not fall behind on project deadlines, as many are collaborative efforts I cannot miss
deadlines.
For the first few weeks I kept the full log as suggested and found this very useful in keeping track of
where I was with each piece of work I was currently involved in and the actions that needed to be
taken. After this initial period my line manager and I sat and discussed whether I thought this
method was necessary or if I felt my organisational skills had improved over this period.
I felt that over this time I had become more organised and focused on my work, however the length
of notes that I kept in my log had dramatically fallen, in fact I had gone from using an A4 binder to
post it notes. Over these weeks I had learnt how to remain organised completely, not missing a
deadline, but to also have a planned structured approach in a timely manner.
Reflecting back on the notes I kept in my first week, a lot of the information I wrote down was
unnecessary and should I show them to a colleague as an indication of progress and actions to be
taken they would be cumbersome. The degree of information I wrote down during the end of these
few weeks and even to the end of my placemen provided short, succinct, structured planning for my
projects and I have found this to be very helpful and will continue to keep notes of project actions
and timelines in such a way as looking back at the notes of progress I kept initially, it was wasteful
and cumbersome and made the level of work required seem much higher than reality.

Desire to continuously learn and develop

During this placement my knowledge of health economics has grown vastly. When I began my first
project there were numerous technical terms that I did not understand fully and as such my line
manager suggested that after I had learnt enough to work on this first project I should devote two
hours a week to continuing to learn health economics and refresh or improve my general economic
knowledge as it would be key to succeeding at the placement.
During my first week I learnt the necessary information to undertake my first project, for example
knowledge of Quality Adjusted Life Years (QALYs), a full QALY is a year of a persons life at peak
health and is often used a measurement of success of a medical procedure. These QALYs are also
given a relevant cost; the cost of a QALY is 60,000 however the NHS is willing to pay between
20,000-30,000 per QALY provided by a treatment due to the opportunity cost of other treatments.
After this period I began spending two hours a week improving my health economics knowledge and
knowledge of how the civil service operates, including borrowing books and information from
colleagues in the office to further my studies.
I thoroughly enjoyed learning about health economics, the biological processes involved in
treatments proposed in projects I was working on, and the methods of the civil services, such as

discounting all costs/benefits created beyond the first year of a police to account of inflation. I have
continued my interest in both health economics and general economics throughout the year.
I hope to carry this forward to my final year of my degree and into employment as this desire to
learn will be very useful to show I am the correct candidate for the job and to perform up to and
beyond standards expected.

Use of specific IT packages or systems (e.g. Excel; SPSS; STATA)

One of the major projects I worked on was looking at the burden disease places upon society on an
individual basis. The benefits are covered by the production created, formal labour such as work,
and informal labour such as unpaid care provided. The costs associated were covered by
consumption and the level of care required, formal, hospital setting, and informal, unpaid care.
For this project, I collated the hospital episodes statistics of various hospitals across the UK to give a
snapshot of the burden of disease in the UK and extrapolated this to apply to the entire UK
population. This required extensive use of Microsoft Excel, as the statistics provided covered every
admission of these hospitals over the past 3 months. The spreadsheets used were very large and
daunting initially but I managed to collect all the information correctly into a single spreadsheet for
the purpose of this project.
I had some help from another placement student to complete this single spreadsheet who
demonstrated a couple of techniques that could be used for such large data sets, such as using cells
on different sheets in a formula and changing the name of any significant cell to something relevant
so anyone else can easily see how calculations are completed. An example would be changing the
name of cell A1 to GDP1 if it contained the GDP of a country in the first year of a time series.
When I next come to handling very large spreadsheets I will look to correctly label significant cells
from the start as this proved to be very useful when explaining my work to colleagues and saved a
notable amount of time in delivering the project. Being able to present data clearly in Excel is
something that will be very useful in future as the Microsoft Office package is a very widely used
suite of programs.

Application of economic theory in a practical context

As part of my placement I have worked on Impact Assessments (IA) for the Department of Health,
these are required when a policy is seen to have an effect upon business or the public and requires
clearance from the Regulatory Protection Committee (RPC).
Working on these IAs has required an understanding of how the policies can affect businesses or the
public and the expected reaction to this. An example would be working on an IA looking at Cosmetic
Interventions, this piece is currently ongoing, which initially looked at classifying dermal fillers as a
prescription only drug, this may have been dropped past the time of writing.
Initially I was able to identify that some businesses would be effected as they would no longer be
able to sell dermal fillers without a significant change to their business model, many beauty salons
currently sell and apply dermal fillers without any qualified professional on site, however I did not
consider how various fringe businesses would be effected, such as podiatrists who are not able to

write prescriptions but currently provide dermal fillers for medical reasons, or even black market
sellers such as those who sell dermal fillers in night clubs.
After discussions with my line manager and team I came to the understanding that I should look
beyond the obvious impacts of the policy and look to the more fringe or real world examples and I
felt that I should ensure that I learnt to look beyond the obvious textbook definitions into more
fringe areas.
The next IA I provided analytical assistance on looked into allowing mitochondria donation in IVF
when the child is likely to develop a severe mitochondria donation. The initial findings discovered
that around 10-15 couples per year would be able to undergo the specialised IVF treatment in the
UK.
Wanting to learn from my previous error in not looking beyond textbook responses I correctly
identified the possibility of increased health tourism as a result of this policy, people travelling from
outside the UK to have this specialised IVF treatment. This was in fact included within the IA and was
noted by the RPC as showing that we had considered a wide variety of effects as a result of the
policy.
Moving forward I hope to continue to look beyond the obvious effects and into the fringe impacts of
economic decisions as these can often be overlooked and not only does it show an attention to
detail within the work but demonstrates that I do understand the wider effects and these have been
considered.
As much of the work I have been involved in is not yet published it has been very difficult to provide
sources, it would be irresponsible of me to source unpublished pieces of government analysis.