VADNP Treasurer Dr. Cindy Zerfoss

Dr. Cindy Zerfoss has been part of the VADNP group when she joined in 2016 as a student. She participated in registration and conference planning and subsequently became the treasure. Dr. Zerfoss has experience as a board member having served as president elect, present, past president of Central Virginia Nurse Practitioner group as well as president elect, president, past president and secretary/treasurer of Carolinas Virginias Society of Critical Care Medicine.  

Dr. Zerfoss's clinical experience is in the intensive care unit and she has practiced as a bedside nurse, critical care clinical educator, and clinical nurse specialist. She graduated from Duke University Medical Center with a post masters degree in acute care nurse practitioner in 2000. Since that time her practice has been in critical care pulmonary, neuroscience, and hospitalist medicine. Over 2 years ago, she joined Centra College as a faculty member and she teaches critical care to the ADN students and nursing theories, advanced health assessment, and introduction to pathophysiology to BSN students. 

Since becoming a nurse practitioner, Dr. Zerfoss has been able to be part of a volunteer group to provide care to the underserved in Guatemala as well as teach fundamentals of critical care medicine to health care providers in Kigali Rwanda. She has had the opportunity to present abstracts/papers/posters in local, regional and national forum. She has been published in nursing, physician assistant, and critical care journals. Dr. Zerfoss completed her DNP in 2018 at Virginia Commonwealth University. Her work there focused on identification of stroke readmission within 30 days using the i-SCOREcriteria.  Her data set was small but secondary outcomes demonstrated i-SCORE to be statistically significant predictor of  30-day readmissions among code stroke patients with p-value .007 and OR 1.01 with CI 1.0-1.02 using a cut-point of 169. The behaviors of nurses collecting the data was monitored and using only social media as the communication tool, data collection improved 5-fold. While this was not statistically significant, it suggested that removal of extrinsic motivators allowed for capture of intrinsic motivation. In her spare time, she enjoys working with underserved populations and helping patients get the resources needed to be successful stewards of their own health.