Researcher biography
Lorelle Holland is a proud Mandandanji woman, who grew up on Turrbal Country with her four sisters and parents. Lorelle is a dedicated and passionate Registered Nurse who has worked for over three decades in the health care industry in varied clinical, management, education, and research roles. Lorelle's clinical nursing career highlight was working as a Remote Area Nurse in the Northern Territory with Aboriginal peoples. In Lorelle's current appointment as an Associate Lecturer in Nursing and an Affiliate Associate Lecturer at the Poche Centre for Indigenous Health at the University of Queensland (UQ) she hopes to inspire the next generation of nurse clinicians and researchers to ensure the delivery of competent, compassionate, and culturally respectful nursing practice.
Lorelle graduated from a Master Degree in Public Health in the field of Indigenous Health in July 2020 at (UQ). Lorelle's proudest academic career highlight thus far was receiving the 'Postgraduate Coursework Academic Excellence Award' from Professor Bronwyn Fredericks (Pro-Vice-Chancellor, Indigenous Engagement) and Professor Tracey Bunda (Academic Director, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies Unit) UQ.
Lorelle's personal standpoint as an Aboriginal woman with spiritual and cultural connections to Mandandanji Country, extensive nursing experience and public health education, allows a broad perspective of the interacting complexities of our environment, health systems, benefits of cohesive interdisciplinary contributions, social determinants of health and the need to decolonise interventions. The rightful platform of decolonising interventions is embedded and validated within the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). The UNDRIP empowers Indigenous peoples to socially transform their own lives within their own knowledges, strengths, and sovereignty that upholds community led and self-determining strategies to enact required national and global changes to ensure equal education, health, economic, and political outcomes for our First Nation's peoples.
Lorelle is enrolled in PhD studies in the School of Public Health in the Medicine Faculty and hopes to explore critical race theory and complex health needs concerning the disproportionate rates of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander youth in detention who are removed from their families during critical periods of child development. Additionally, Lorelle's research will utilise a transformative epistemology and decolonising methodologies that centres youth and their communities to reflexively co-design culturally appropriate holistic assessment and diversionary pathways to counter harmful youth detention practices.