Lorelei Lingard

Research Synopsis

Dr. Lorelei Lingard is a leading researcher in the study of communication and collaboration on healthcare teams. She is a Professor in the Department of Medicine at the University of Western Ontario (UWO) and the inaugural Director of the Centre for Education Research & Innovation at the Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry at UWO. Dr. Lingard obtained her Ph.D. in Rhetoric from the English Department at Simon Fraser University, specializing in rhetorical theory, genre theory, medical discourse, and qualitative methodology. As a rhetorician, she investigates ‘language as social action’: that is, how social groups use language to get things done, and how that language acts on them, their identities, their purposes, their situations, their relationships. Her research program has investigated the nature of communication on inter- professional healthcare teams in a variety of clinical settings, including the operating room, the intensive care unit, the internal medicine ward, the adult rehabilitation unit, and the family health centre. She is particularly interested in how communication patterns influence patient safety, and how learning to talk in sanctioned ways shapes the professional identity of novices. In addition to her team communication research, she is currently intrigued by methodological challenges such as accounting for silence in the study of communication and conceptual projects such as critiquing the individualist discourse of competence. Dr. Lingard’s research program is funded by CIHR, SSHRC, Health Canada, MOHLTC, the RCPSC and other agencies. She has been the recipient of numerous awards for her research, including a Canadian Institutes of Health Research New Investigator award (2003-2008).