Dr. Celestine Ofori-Parku is a full-scope nurse-midwife and maternal health researcher who earned her PhD in Nursing Science from the University of California, San Francisco. She earned a Bachelor of Science in Nursing (Midwifery) at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Ghana, where her research on institutional delays hindering her hospital’s emergency maternal healthcare access helped to inform a hospital-wide triage policy and training. She has nearly two decades of clinical experience in full-spectrum obstetric and gynecological practice, including more than 1,000 baby deliveries, and a strong record of progressive leadership experience managing cross-functional hospital-based maternity teams that enhance her research application and implementation. Her clinical leadership experience also includes training and mentoring student nurses, midwives, and physicians. While at UCSF, Celestine completed a three-year fellowship as an ACTIONs Predoctoral Fellow, where she focused on transformational change in reproductive health and justice. She also worked with the UCSF Motivating Interdisciplinary Lactation Knowledge (MILK) Research Lab, and completed a one-year advocacy and communication fellowship with the Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health, where she focused on work to influence policy and public debate. Her dissertation examined the experiences of perinatal health clinicians regarding respectful maternity care, as well as their perspectives on provider-level, health-facility, and system-level barriers and facilitators to providing dignified maternity care. Celestine’s research uses mixed-methods and community engaged approaches to examine health systems and workforce factors that shape respectful and equitable maternal and neonatal healthcare. Drawing on human rights and reproductive justice frameworks, she examines the multifaceted inequalities in health systems and outcomes in obstetrics and gynecology, developing and evaluating innovative care models that reduce treatment and outcome disparities.
Research Interests: Conducting health systems and workforce research that examines the multifaceted inequalities in maternal health systems and outcomes, developing innovative respectful care models that reduce these treatment and outcome disparities.