Dr Collette Straughair

Collette Straughair is a Registered Nurse and Registered Midwife who joined Northumbria University in September 2005 as a Senior Lecturer in Adult Nursing.

Since joining the university she has developed a research interest in the concept of compassion in nursing and has recently completed doctoral research to investigate this phenomenon. She has delivered conference presentations and published on this subject and plans to continue investigating this area of interest through post-doctoral research activity. She is Programme Leader to a cohort of adult nursing students and Personal Tutor to a smaller group of personal students. She is involved in the delivery of teaching across all years of the undergraduate nursing programme and student assessment at levels 4, 5, 6 and 7. 

Collette Straughair commenced her Registered Nurse training in January 1987 and undertook one of the very first programmes in the North East region to qualify with Registered Nurse status and a Diploma in Nursing Sciences, awarded by Newcastle Polytechnic. Following qualification she worked in various Staff Nurse positions in the specialties of medicine and elderly care. In 1999 she commenced an 18 month programme to achieve Registered Midwife status and graduated with a first class honours degree, subsequently working in Hartlepool and North Tees NHS Trust and City Hospitals Sunderland NHS trust as a Staff Midwife across all areas of midwifery practice in primary and secondary care. She went on to work as a Health Care Assistant Development Nurse and implemented an educational programme for Health Care Assistants in the Sunderland area before moving to South Tyneside to take up a role as a Practice Development Nurse in the medicine and elderly care directorate.  Since September 2005, Collette has worked at Northumbria University as a Senior Lecturer in Adult Nursing and has recently completed her PhD entitled: “Understanding compassion: A constructivist grounded theory study to explore the perceptions of individuals who have experienced nursing care”.