Leticia Suwedi-Kapesa earned a bachelor’s degree in nursing from the University of Malawi (Kamuzu College of Nursing) and worked with the Malawi Ministry of Health, providing comprehensive nursing care. She furthered her education with a Master of Public Health from the University of Malawi (College of Medicine). Her master's project evaluated service quality in maternity waiting homes under Associate Professor Alinane Linda Nyondo-Mipando.

Under the Malawi Ministry of Health, Leticia completed the Frontline Field Epidemiology Training Programme and became a national mentor before being promoted to Senior Nursing Officer. She also conducted health systems research consultancies with the College of Medicine as a research assistant for HIV and maternal and child health projects. Later, she joined Malawi Liverpool Wellcome Programme as a pre-PhD intern and evaluated early infant diagnosis of HIV services in Blantyre.

Before her PhD, Leticia worked at the Public Health Institute of Malawi, where her nursing responsibilities shifted to enhancing health workforce performance in disease surveillance and response across the country. She also served as a social scientist with the Blantyre Malaria Project, leading a multidisciplinary team to develop procedures for consenting in a study on post-mortem minimally invasive tissue sampling to investigate COVID-19 and lung infections in adults.

Leticia is a PhD student in Global Health at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, under the supervision of Dr Angela Obasi. She is co-designing a context-responsive health system intervention to increase early infant diagnosis uptake, aligning with World Health Organisation recommendations on point-of-care testing and service integration.

Leticia’s research interests focus on strengthening health systems. Her PhD research uses mixed methods to co-design and evaluate a context-responsive enhanced health system intervention in two phases.

In the first phase, she assessed the enrolment coverage of infants exposed to HIV in the HIV care programme and those tested at six weeks via a retrospective data review. She explored early infant diagnosis service implementation gaps through process mapping of mother-infant pairs and investigated healthcare workers' views on these gaps through group interviews.

In the second phase, prevention of vertical transmission of HIV, she worked with managers in the Blantyre district using stakeholder mapping to identify stakeholders comprising health care workers, service users, and non-governmental organisations. They analysed health system challenges and co-designed interventions in two qualitative workshops with the identified stakeholders.

The group then evaluated the effectiveness of the co-designed intervention with a controlled before-and-after prospective data review of women with their infants exposed to HIV, followed by examining the implementation of the co-designed intervention through structured observations with health care workers and assessing its acceptability and sustainability via interviews with women and health care workers.

Leticia completed the taught programme in Leading in Global Health Teaching and was awarded the Associate Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy in accordance with UK professional standards.

Through consultancies, she contributes to interactive teaching (online and in-person) for postgraduate and undergraduate programmes in global health, focusing on preventing vertical transmission of HIV, early infant diagnosis of HIV, and research into practice. Leticia also moderates exams.