Dr. Dzifa Dordunoo

PhD, Assistant Professor
University of Victoria

Dzifa Dordunoo PhD, RN — a native of Dzodze, Ghana, is assistant professor at the University of Victoria, school of nursing. As a clinician, Dzifa has over 20 years nursing experience working in general medicine and critical care units mostly at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. In addition, she worked both at the outpatient sickle cell and the heart failure clinics. 

Dr Dordunoo has spent the past decade as a nurse educator. She began her teaching career in 2011 as a clinical instructor at John Hopkins School of Nursing, she later taught at the University of Maryland, School of Nursing before joining the UVic School of Nursing in 2017. Dzifa teaches a variety of courses at the undergraduate and graduate level, particularly courses in cardiac surgical nursing, research methodology, pharmacology as well as quantitative and qualitative data analyses.

As a scholar and researcher, she has a strong research interest in improving access and quality of health services. Her program of research leverages dissemination and implementation science with patient-centered lens to address factors that influence quality and safety of care and outcomes, using both quantitative and qualitative methodologies. Dzifa worked on several investigator-initiated studies and phase III/IV FDA clinical trials with implantable medical devices. Her recent projects have focused on hypersensitivity reactions to implantable medical devices and racism as predictor of health outcomes. 

Dr Dordunoo earned her bachelor's degree (with distinction) from University of Victoria (Canada) and holds a master’s degree from Duke University (USA) with post-master's certificate in clinical research management and teaching. She completed her doctoral education at the University of Maryland Baltimore (USA). She was the inaugural president of the Coalition of African, Caribbean and Black Nurses in British Columbia. She is currently the Director of the University of Victoria Centre for Evidence-Informed Nursing and Healthcare (CEiNHC): A JBI Centre of Excellence and serves on the boards for the Pan-Canadian Nurses of African Descent and the Sickle Cell Association of Canada.