Our Team.
Claire Sorenson, PhD, RNC-NIC
President & Lead Advisor
Born and raised in Wisconsin, Dr. Claire Sorenson moved to Chicago in 2008 to attend nursing school at Loyola University. Following graduation, she lived and worked in the city for almost 15 years, specializing in the high-acuity, high-stress environments of the NICU, PICU, and case management. Her unwavering dedication to her work and her colleagues gave her unmatched insight into the motivations, stressors, and breaking points of healthcare workers at all levels, especially bedside staff. She saw how those factors affected not only each individual employee, but also the team, department, and the institution as a whole.
Claire's passion for healthcare quality and improvement led her to practice within healthcare settings at every level of funding, acuity, and geographic/demographic constituency, from top-tier academic medical centers in urban epicenters to severely under-resourced makeshift facilities in developing countries. This wildly diverse professional landscape afforded Claire the opportunity to find the common threads that affected teams all over the world, regardless of location or departmental makeup: the negative, and entirely preventable, effects of compassion fatigue, emotional exhaustion, and burnout.
Under "normal" circumstances, the often unaccounted-for negative effects of burnout and compassion fatigue affect not only the delivery of care, but also corporate culture, departmental efficiency, employee recruitment and retention, and most alarmingly, patient outcomes. Under the unrelenting pressure of a crisis, like a global pandemic, clinical staff experiences intolerable levels of strain. That strain depletes emotional and mental resources, catalyzes dramatic employee turnover, and jeopardizes institutional reputation, outcomes, and viability.
As her experience and evidence grew, Claire chose to commit to the fight against compassion fatigue by making it the subject of the dissertation for her doctorate. Over the next seven years, Claire dedicated herself to researching, writing about, and strategizing specific tactics to identify and mitigate existing stressors, while predicting and preventing future challenges. In 2017, Claire made her way to the International Standards Development Team at The Joint Commission, where she successfully campaigned for the expansion of global standards language addressing the negative effects of burnout and compassion fatigue, helping to protect the health of clinical staff across the world.
