Oxford MSc Health Policy Supplemental Essay Example: Career Change (Score 93)

I am submitting a 2,800-word policy memo I produced during my final-year applied project at the University of Ghana, Legon, examining the fiscal sustainability of the National Health Insurance Authority's capitation payment model in the Greater Accra Region. I chose this piece rather than a longer finance dissertation because it most directly demonstrates the analytic register the MSc Health Policy requires: it moves from quantitative claims about claims-expenditure ratios to a normative argument about provider incentive design, and it was written for a real stakeholder audience — a district health directorate — rather than for academic credit alone. The memo's central method is a comparative cost analysis drawing on NHIA district-level expenditure data for 2021–2022, set against utilisation figures from three peri-urban primary care facilities in Ga East. From that evidence base I argue that flat per-capita payments systematically underfund facilities serving high-burden chronic-disease populations, creating a structural incentive to gate-keep rather than treat. The argument is not original to me — it echoes debates in the Lancet Ghana Commission — but the memo's contribution is applying a financing-equity lens to sub-district data that the existing literature had not disaggregated. That move, connecting macro-level payment architecture to facility-level behaviour, is the analytic habit I most want to develop at Oxford. I am honest about the memo's limits. The dataset is administrative and self-reported, so I cannot rule out coding inconsistencies across facilities; my regression controls are limited to facility size and patient volume, omitting socioeconomic catchment variables I lacked access to. More fundamentally, I am a finance undergraduate working at the edge of health economics methodology: I can read a cost-effectiveness table but I have not yet been trained in DALYs, willingness-to-pay thresholds, or the econometric tools the MSc's Health Systems and Financing stream deploys rigorously. That gap is precisely why I am applying. The programme's core quantitative methods module and the option in Economic Evaluation of Health Interventions would give my applied instincts the methodological scaffolding they currently lack. The full memo runs to 2,800 words including data appendices. If the department's word-count ceiling for written work requires a shorter submission, I am prepared to provide the main analytical sections — approximately 1,800 words — and flag the omission clearly on the cover page. I am happy to supply the complete document, underlying data tables, or the directorate's feedback letter on request.