Alumni Profile: Tyler Traister, BSN ’14
Tyler Traister ’14 is now an assistant professor of nursing at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut.
To Tyler Traister ’14, being a nurse is all about helping people, whether in times of need or good health, regardless of how those patients identify.
If those patients are part of the LGBTQ+ community, it’s possible they may face discrimination from some people in the healthcare community. To help bridge the gap between this population and healthcare providers, Tyler wrote Fast Facts about LGBTQ+ Care for Nurses: How to Deliver Culturally Competent and Inclusive Care, a textbook aimed at educating professionals about LGBTQ+ patients and helping them confront their biases.
The book was honored last year by the American Journal of Nursing with the third-place prize in their Professional Issues category.
“It’s a tool,” Tyler said of the textbook. “Nurses can take this and help really close that gap. When you look at nursing curriculums and other medical curriculums, they spend less than three hours talking about LGBTQ+ health. Because we don’t have that time to talk about the content, we don’t have that knowledge there.
“My goal is to help build nurses’ confidence and knowledge in caring for this population so that they’re able to be care excellence.”
Although the book is aimed explicitly at nursing students, professional nurses, and nursing faculty, Tyler said any person could pick up his writing and use it to learn about caring for anyone different from themselves.
Tyler received his bachelor of science in Nursing degree from Chatham University through the partnership with the UPMC Shadyside School of Nursing. He remembers being able to use the cadaver lab at Chatham, and he said the University was where he learned about the importance of writing well—something he tries to pass on to his students at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut, where he’s an assistant professor of nursing.
“It made a lot of sense to go to Chatham, so I didn’t have a disruption in education.”
His time at Chatham also gave him a chance to learn about community healthcare outside the classroom and the hospital.
“In the Community Health course that I did at Chatham, I was able to do a clinical at the Allegheny County Health Department, which I found to be a great immersion experience in community health, learning about how the health department works with vaccinations and outreach,” he said.
Tyler said it was convenient to graduate from his registered nursing program at UPMC and seamlessly transition to his BSN program at Chatham the next month.
“It made a lot of sense to go to Chatham, so I didn’t have a disruption in education,” he said.
“It took me only a year to finish the bachelor’s,” he added.
While at Chatham, he wrote a paper on trans women and HIV, and he further developed his writings on health disparities while obtaining his master’s degree at Carlow University. He eventually wrote a dissertation on RN’s attitudes and knowledge of LGBTQ+ health while obtaining his doctoral degree there in 2018.
“This dissertation came from seeing my own personal experiences of being a gay person and having friends who are LGBTQ and trans and hearing about their stories with healthcare,” he said. “Because of their identity, they had poor healthcare experiences, and they faced discrimination in their own right.”
He said his students and peers feel discussions around LGBTQ+ health are usually confined to sexually transmitted infections and diseases, and that usually becomes the focus for healthcare providers who aren’t specialized in treating LGBTQ+ populations. Sometimes that focus is misplaced, Tyler said.
“I had one friend who thought he had coeliac disease, he wanted to be looked at for Chron’s disease, and every time he went to the doctor’s office, they wanted to test him for HIV,” Tyler said. “We’re still seeing that in nursing today.”
Recently, Tyler wrapped up a national study involving over 3,000 participants looking into attitudes towards the COVID-19 vaccine in LGBTQ+ populations. He found social media, family providers, and celebrity endorsements (Dolly Parton, who helped fund the Moderna vaccine, in particular) led to more positive attitudes towards the vaccine among participants.
When it comes to helping any patient, the focus for Tyler comes down to avoiding a fixation on labels and taking a holistic view of the patient as a person, he said.
“Remembering that even if they’re identified as straight, cisgender—that’s still sexual identity, that’s still gender identity,” he said. “We all have these identities, so let’s create a space where people, when they seek help, we’re able to help them.”
Click here to explore Chatham’s online undergraduate and graduate nursing programs. Chatham prepares nurses for a variety of healthcare settings and roles.
Mick Stinelli is a Writer and Digital Content Specialist at Chatham University. His writing has previously appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and 90.5 WESA, and he has a B.A. in Broadcast Production and Media Management from Point Park University. Mick, a native of western Pennsylvania, spends his free time watching movies and playing music.