Caritas Leadership Program

With a deep-rooted passion for improving the lives of healthcare professionals, Christine Griffin is a leader in the field of healthcare professional well-being. As well-being is multifaceted and multidimensional, Christine has worked with healthcare organizations around the world to advance an ecosystem approach to address complex work environments within healthcare systems. With experience in healthcare leadership, implementing system-wide innovative strategies, personal and professional development, and multi-disciplinary team approaches, Christine is committed to fostering holistic and sustainable environments where all healthcare professionals can thrive. In her Caring Science Ph.D. program, “Compassion without Fatigue,” Chris studied how theory-guided practices within Caring Science can heal those working in healthcare, giving them the capacity to flourish as they bring their authentic care and compassion to the bedside. In her role as Chief Wellbeing Officer Children’s Hospital Los Angeles and faculty member at the Watson Caring Science Institute, Chris encourages healthcare organizations to cultivate safe and healing environments for their staff. She advocates for a transformative approach to healthcare that reconnects providers with the essence and significance of their work, anchored in the principles and ethos of Caring Science.

Sara joined the faculty at the University of San Francisco School of Nursing and Health Professions in fall 2018 as a full professor. She teaches courses in health policy, ethics and scholarly writing in the Population Health DNP and advances Caring Science through partnerships with Kaiser Permanente and Caritas Coaches in the Bay Area. Over the past 4.5 years she served as the Jean Watson Caring Science Chair at the University of Colorado. In this role, she advanced the art and science of human caring knowledge, ethics, and clinical practice in nursing and health sciences. She fostered research, teaching, and practice of human caring through an interprofessional PhD program and continuing education training programs that integrated new knowledge from humanities, arts, cross-cultural spiritual disciplines, and emerging scientific disciplines. She continues to mentor PhD students at the University of Colorado. Finally, through an appointment at the University of South Africa she works with partners to extend Caring Science and reflective practice globally. Sara’s work in reflective practice has been published in two books coedited with Dr. Gwen Sherwood: Reflective Practice: Transforming Education and Improving Outcomes (Sigma Theta Tau International, 2012 & 2017) and Reflective Organizations: On the Front Lines of QSEN & Reflective Practice Implementation (Sigma Theta Tau International, 2015). The latter was recognized as 2015 AJN Book of the Year. Clinical nurses and academic programs around the world use these books to support deep learning that leads to intentional, reflective, and thoughtful action. It was through the iterative process of reflection that Horton-Deutsch deepened her own work in reflective practice, resulting in the integration of Caring Science. In spring 2018, she co-edited the textbook, Caritas Coaching: A Journey Toward Transpersonal Caring for Informed Moral Action in Healthcare with Dr. Jan Anderson. In fall 2018, The Handbook of Caring Science, an encyclopedia, representing over 30 years of caring science scholarship was co-edited Drs. Billy Rosa and Jean Watson. Sara has previously been an active participant in the Quality and Safety Education for Nurses (QSEN) initiative, contributing to the publication of web-based teaching modules on mindfulness, narrative and reflective pedagogies, and cultural equity and inclusion. Since 2011, she had co-facilitated a 3-week summer institute for Thai Faculty on Reflective Practice at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. In summer 2018, she served as the first nurse “wizard” at the 25TH Annual Health Professions Educators’ Summer Symposium, an interprofessional community of health professions educators, whose mission is to nourish and sustain leaders to catalyze improvements in healthcare. She is honored to be a faculty member at Watson Caring Science Institute working alongside others to expand caring consciousness in the world.

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