Ditzel is a registered nurse, gaining her nursing qualifications through Peterborough and Stamford Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust in the UK.
She supervised more than forty postgraduate students, and completed a PhD titled A study of perceived occupational stress, burnout and sense of community among New Zealand nurses at the university in 2008.
[3] Ditzel then returned to nursing education, joining the faculty of Otago Polytechnic in 2010, and rising to full professor in 2019.
[2][1] Ditzel is interested in the use of new technology in nursing education, and has investigated the use of mixed-reality education, standardised holographic patients, and methods for improving critical thinking and clinical reasoning in nursing students.
[2][4] She collaborated with colleagues Claire Goode, Karole Hogarth, and Jean Ross to investigate the use of video in health education, which was published as a chapter in the 2021 Springer book Video Pedagogy: Theory and Practice, edited by Dilani Gedera and Arezou Zalipour.