Dr. Emma Kwegyir-Afful

Current positions

Lecturer in Adult Nursing

Biography

Dr Kwegyir-Afful joined the University of Salford in 2019 as a lecturer in Adult Nursing. Her current role includes teaching across BSc and MSc Nursing programmes and supervision of PhD and master's thesis. Prior to this post, Emma had worked as a nurse, a midwife, educator and a researcher both in Ghana and in Finland. Her experience as a practicing nurse-midwife in Ghana for over 15 years, increased her desire to make a contribution to the reduction in the incidence of adverse birth outcomes. Emma has dual certification as a nurse and a midwife from Ghana since 1995 and 1999 respectively. Obtained a First-Class degree in Nursing with Psychology from the University of Ghana and a second bachelor’s degree in Health and Social Care from the Jyvaskyla University of Applied Sciences in Finland. Emma completed both her MSc and PhD in Public Health from the University of Eastern Finland. She has also completed PgCert in Education.

Emma's PhD thesis was titled "Reducing heavy lifting in pregnant women to prevent adverse pregnancy outcomes" with a focus on developing an intervention to reduce excessive workload especially among pregnant women in sub-Saharan Africa. Following on the PhD project, she has collaborated with other international researchers to develop the lift-less intervention protocol which has since been published. Emma has secured on two consecutive times Erasmus+ Mobility funding for teaching and learning collaboration between the Department of Nursing Science at the University of Eastern Finland and the School of Nursing & Midwifery at the University of Ghana.

Areas of research

Maternal working conditions, Breastfeeding, Sickle cell disease in pregnancy