Dr Nyirenda is a senior specialist in Emergency Medicine and Internal medicine at the Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital, Blantyre, Malawi.  She was the founding head of the first modernized adult emergency department in Malawi – hub of emergency medicine activities in the country. She holds a senior lecturer post in the school of Medicine at Kamuzu University of Health Sciences (KUHeS).

As a pioneer educator and trainer, her key contributions to academic emergency medicine have been collaborations that have led to among others; the development of postgraduate specialty training in Emergency Medicine at the University of Malawi College of Medicine in 2012, emergency medicine modules within other specialty training programs and the undergraduate curriculum.  She also serves on the Medical Education and Training Committee (COMETO) – providing support and training to faculty.

She organizes and conducts continual professional development activities related to acute and trauma care for clinicians and nurses in Malawi. She coordinates the Primary Trauma Care Course faculty in Malawi and is a national trainer of the WHO Basic Emergency Care Course (BEC). She provided leadership and mentorship to the national COVID-19 clinical case management course faculty that taught and mentored health care workers in Malawi Health system in 2020.

Under the Malawian Ministry of Health, her key contributions to emergency care system development in Malawi have been provision of leadership to the Pre Hospital Care planning Committee from 2012 to 2015 that was instrumental in facilitating out-of-hospital emergency care provision Bye-Laws and facilitated the creation of the Emergency Medical Services (EMS) sponsored by the World Bank project to respond to Road Traffic Accidents in Malawi. She currently serves on the emergency and critical care working group and COVID19 clinical case management and advisory experts’ committees.

Her clinical research portfolio includes multi-national HIV clinical trials since 2004 as well as other researching acute care, infectious diseases, medical education, medical Informatics and technology, and health care systems strengthening. She was part of the Fogarty Emergency Care Systems Working Group for the Collaborative for Enhancing Emergency Care Research in Low and Middle Income Countries (CLEER).

On the global health arena, she is a mentor in the Global Emergency Medicine Student Leadership Program as an ACEP international section member and is part of the international faculty for the certificate in emergency medicine program (CPEM) -collaborative education program between Harvard University and the Indus Hospital in Pakistan. She has also contributed to the Global Emergency Care Skills (GECS) initiative with Irish emergency medicine doctors to provide high quality emergency care training to healthcare professionals in countries with developing emergency medicine healthcare systems.  She is a section editor and author on the AFEM Handbook of Acute and Emergency Medicine versions 1 and 2.  She is an associate editor of the African Journal of Emergency Medicine.

Dr Nyirenda is one of the few women leaders in Emergency Medicine in Africa. She serves on the board of African Federation of Emergency Medicine as a Southern African Region representative. She has been involved with the International Federation of Emergency Medicine since 2016 as a member of Gender Specific Issues Special Interest Group. She also serves on the Governance committee and is now the African Representative on the IFEM Board.