Dr Lorraine Thirsk is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Health Disciplines of Athabasca University. Her research aims to reduce suffering and improve quality of life for families living with health challenges by improving nurses’ relational practices and competencies in therapeutic conversations. Recently, this work has focused specifically on how cognitive and implicit biases impact fundamental and necessary nurse-patient relationships, therapeutic communication, and clinical judgment. This has led to an interest in racism and discrimination in healthcare and work on decolonizing nursing education. Three overarching questions guide her research program: What are nurses doing to support families (i.e., in adult acute care)? What could they be doing to support families? What individual and organizational factors facilitate or impede these independent nursing practices?

Dr Lorraine Thirsk is an associate professor in the Faculty of Health Disciplines. She has worked as a registered nurse for over 20 years with early clinical experience in rural and urban areas, tertiary facilities and community care, nephrology, and palliative care. Her graduate education focused on advanced practice in family nursing and her teaching, research, and service continues to be heavily influenced by family systems theory and family nursing practices. In her program of research, Dr. Thirsk aims to improve quality of life and reduce suffering for families living with serious health challenges by improving nurses’ competencies in relational practice and therapeutic conversations. Presently much of this research focuses on nurses’ clinical decision-making and how bias and stigmatization affect nurse-patient relationships and, subsequently, patient and family outcomes. This research uses both qualitative and quantitative methods, from Gadamerian hermeneutics to natural language processing.