https://www.infirmiere-canadienne.com/blogs/ic-contenu/2026/04/07/patricia-lingley-pottie-institut-familles-solides
Patricia Lingley-Pottie shares how tragedy motivated her to choose a career in research and mental health care after years of pediatric nursing
By Laura Eggertson
April 7, 2026
Stacie Corrigan Photography
“I’m very involved with the care that we deliver from a nursing perspective, from a consultation perspective,” Dr. Patricia Lingley-Pottie says.
When Dr. Patricia Lingley-Pottie thinks about why she chose a career in research and mental health care after years of pediatric nursing, she remembers the face of a small girl named Judy.
It was 1988, and Lingley-Pottie had just started working on the kidney transplant and dialysis unit at Toronto’s famed Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids).
Judy, a five-year-old girl from a small Mennonite community in southwestern Ontario, was severely ill with a rare genetic disorder that brought her into Lingley-Pottie’s care.
For the next three years, Lingley-Pottie was at Judy’s side as her primary care nurse during 28 operations, including kidney transplants.
On her days off, Lingley-Pottie and her husband, Darryl Pottie, visited with Judy’s family at their home. Lingley-Pottie brushed the little girl’s hair and played games with her. She helped Judy prepare, emotionally, for the difficult surgeries.
But nothing prepared Lingley-Pottie, now the president and CEO of the Strongest Families Institute (SFI), for the phone call she got on another one of her days off.
On her way to hemodialysis at SickKids, Judy had a tonic-clonic seizure. She died in her mother’s arms.
‘Caring to curing’
“I was devastated,” says Lingley-Pottie, who tears up as she thinks about Judy’s impact in her life. “I still to this day am in touch with the family.”
Judy’s death made Lingley-Pottie realize that as much as she loved working with children and families as a bedside nurse, she wanted to improve the lives of more people than she could touch in her individual nursing practice.
Research, she felt, held the promise of learning to prevent and cure illnesses for many, rather than treating a few.
Judy was the impetus for Lingley-Pottie’s move, as she told another interviewer, from “caring to curing.”
Lingley-Pottie and her husband decided to move back to Nova Scotia, where she was born and raised, and start their family.
While working at the IWK Health Centre in Halifax, Lingley-Pottie took her infant daughter to get her two-month immunizations and ended up joining a research study.
Her experience in the study led to a nursing job helping to run clinical vaccine trials at the Canadian Center for Vaccinology, and to the start of Lingley-Pottie’s research career.
Dismantling care barriers
During her clinical trials regulatory work, Lingley-Pottie met Dr. Patrick McGrath, a psychologist and researcher studying how to reduce children’s pain during vaccine trials. McGrath hired Lingley-Pottie to work with him. He also supported her dream of getting a doctorate from Dalhousie University, which she earned in 2011.
Together, McGrath and Lingley-Pottie founded the SFI, which currently provides virtual mental health care to between 10,000 and 13,000 people across Canada.
Initially a research initiative the Canadian Institutes of Health Research funded at Dalhousie and the IWK Health Centre, SFI has since become an independent, not-for profit organization whose mission is to dismantle the barriers children, youth, and families face when trying to access mental health care.
During her nursing practice, including when she supported Judy, Lingley-Pottie had become acutely aware of the long wait lists children and families faced, the difficulty rural families had in travelling for care, the prohibitive cost, and the stigma associated with mental health treatment.
She and McGrath were determined to create a system based on a cognitive behavioural approach that would make it possible for children and families to get effective help quickly — right in their own homes.
Concrete help, virtually
Long before the COVID-19 pandemic made virtual care commonplace, Lingley-Pottie and her team were convinced of the value of using an internet-based system, paired with trained coaches, to offer people practical tools during their toughest times.
“We developed this new system of care based on the best science, from internationally renowned academics and all kinds of professionals, and people with lived experience,” she says. “We were pioneers in co-designing a system of care.”
Lingley-Pottie and her team developed six different mental health and well-being educational programs, including handbooks, videos, and coaching protocols. Then they assessed their system, which they continue to evaluate to make sure it helps the children, youth, and families using it.
The Strongest Families team delivers the evidence-based, bilingual programs online, through their own proprietary software platform and app, as well as over the phone via the coaches.
There is no cost to clients, so anyone, anywhere, can receive concrete help in emotional regulation for children and youth, parent training, and cognitive behavioural approaches designed to reduce anxiety, depression and stress in children, youth and adults, as well as a nighttime bedwetting program, Lingley-Pottie says.
The results include easy-to-access interventions in a stepped-care approach, with three different intensity levels, depending upon where people are in their mental health journey.
The coaching model overcame diagnosable pediatric mental health disorders, including ADHD, with no medication, Lingley-Pottie says. At least 85 per cent of clients reported that the issues that brought them to the program were resolved after completing one of SFI’s programs, she adds.
Nursing at the core
Currently, SFI has a $6-million budget, and Lingley-Pottie, as CEO, supervises a 75-member team.
The organization has several provincial and territorial contracts, as well as a national contract to serve military families, veterans, and RCMP members and families.
Although the referral pathways differ in each jurisdiction where SFI has a contract, enrolment is always free for the clients.
Becoming a CEO, as well as a researcher, might seem like significant departures from bedside nursing, Lingley-Pottie acknowledges. But her pediatric nursing experience lies at the core of her current roles, she says.
“It’s just always a matter of being there, for the clients, for the families, and for my staff,” she says.
She learned at her patients’ bedside about the critical importance of providing family-centred care and incorporating her patients’ lived experience into any treatment plan. These are now two foundational aspects of SFI’s system of care.
“All I really knew coming in was to listen to the clients, listen to our patients — let them inform how this system or these programs are being designed to meet their needs,” Lingley-Pottie says.
In addition to using her nursing knowledge to help design the Strongest Families’ system, Lingley-Pottie also continues to consult on individual cases.
“I’m very involved with the care that we deliver from a nursing perspective, from a consultation perspective,” she says. “When there’s a problem or something that’s beyond the parameters of the protocol [they’re using], my staff call me.”
Top CEO
Lingley-Pottie is particularly proud of the results the Strongest Families coaches achieve.
“Our trials showed that our skills-based approach using paraprofessional telephone support coaches overcame diagnosable pediatric mental health disorders, including ADHD [attention deficit hyperactivity disorder], ODD [oppositional defiant disorder], CD [conduct disorder], and various anxiety disorders,” she says.
Lingley-Pottie’s achievements include being named one of Atlantic Canada’s Top 50 CEOs (three times), as well as receiving one of the Governor General’s Innovation Awards, among others.
Balancing her family life with her continuing research projects, running SFI, consulting on individual cases, fundraising, and supervising students is a challenging task.
Lingley-Pottie works hard at disconnecting from her phone and computer at the end of the day, or when she’s on vacation — a feat she can achieve because of her “phenomenal staff,” she says.
Self-care involves “fancy shoes and fancy nails” that she does herself, as well as baking, gardening, and spending time with her husband and grown children — Breanna, Jacob, and Madisyn — and grandchildren.
Despite the difficult issues SFI helps people and families navigate, Lingley-Pottie seldom feels discouraged. She’s buoyed, instead, by stories of success.
One of those success stories concerns a teenager from Newfoundland and Labrador who was suicidal when she began participating in an SFI program designed to help youth defeat anxiety and depression.
Within weeks, the program changed the girl’s life, her mother told Lingley-Pottie. Today, the young woman is competing in curling at a national level.
“She would never have done that without her program skills,” Lingley-Pottie says.
Hearing those stories makes Lingley-Pottie determined to encourage more provincial and territorial governments to expand their service contracts, so Strongest Families can help more people like the teenager in Newfoundland and Labrador.
“I’ve devoted my life — my whole career — to research and just making a difference in people’s lives,” Lingley-Pottie says. “I wake up and I just want to make a difference.”
And if she’s ever short on inspiration, she has only to look over her shoulder at the angel ornament she keeps in her home office to represent eight-year-old Judy.
Laura Eggertson is a freelance journalist based in Wolfville, N.S.
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