About DR. CHRIS SCHAEFFER, DNP, MS, RN, CHPN

Chris Schaeffer, DNP, CHPN, brings more than three decades of hard-won expertise to the intersection of clinical excellence, operational leadership, and workforce transformation in hospice and palliative care. Her career is defined not by titles alone but by a consistent pattern: she enters complex, high-stakes environments — programs struggling with regulatory deficiencies, stalled quality metrics, and fragmented teams — and leaves them fundamentally stronger. At JSSA Hospice, she led a 150-patient-census program from multiple survey deficiencies to a 100% deficiency-free CHAP accreditation in 2025, while also directing a $1M EMR implementation that improved billing performance from 80% to 90+%. At Gilchrist Hospice, she served as a clinical anchor for a 1,200-patient program and 300-member nursing workforce, embedding Six Sigma methodology and root cause analysis practices in partnership with the Maryland Patient Safety Commission. These are not isolated achievements — they are evidence of a leader who operates with the same precision and intensity at the systems level as she does at the bedside.

What distinguishes Chris as an executive is a rare dual capability: she is an expert clinician who never lost her instinct to teach, and a seasoned operator who never lost her connection to direct care. She can walk into a room of frontline nurses struggling with a symptom management crisis and provide hands-on clinical guidance grounded in 30 years of end-of-life expertise — including structured instruction in clinical reasoning, equipping nurses to think critically through complex patient presentations rather than simply follow protocol. She can walk into a room of clinical managers and redesign the framework through which they lead — restructuring huddles, reorienting quality metrics, rebuilding the culture of accountability and compassion that high-performing hospice teams require. This is servant leadership in its most concrete form: not a philosophy to be posted on a wall, but a daily practice of showing up for the people doing the hardest work in healthcare, and equipping them to do it better.

Chris’s record of workforce development is particularly distinctive. She has designed and delivered CHPN certification preparation programs that have meaningfully elevated clinical expertise across nursing staffs at multiple organizations. She has built nurse residency frameworks, created competency validation programs, and pioneered the use of shared digital platforms to make evidence-based guidance accessible in real time to distributed care teams. Central to her leadership philosophy is the cultivation of a Just Culture environment — one in which staff are encouraged to speak openly, acknowledge errors without fear of punitive reprisal, and actively participate in identifying and resolving systemic weaknesses in care processes. By institutionalizing Just Culture principles, Chris has transformed team dynamics: nurses who once hesitated to surface concerns now understand that transparency is not a liability but a cornerstone of patient safety and organizational improvement. Her ELNEC Train-the-Trainer certification reflects both her mastery of end-of-life clinical education and her commitment to multiplying impact — teaching the teachers, so that excellence propagates far beyond what any single leader can directly touch. At every stage of her career, she has understood that the most durable form of clinical improvement is not a policy or a protocol — it is a workforce that knows why the standards exist and is inspired to uphold them.

Named the 2026 HPNA/HPCC CHPN Nurse of the Year and holding a Doctor of Nursing Practice from Aspen University and a Master of Science in Palliative Care from the University of Maryland, Baltimore, Chris brings academic rigor and national recognition to her executive practice. She is a board member of the Hospice & Palliative Care Network of Maryland and a seasoned conference presenter. Her commitment to service extends well beyond organizational walls. Early in her career, from 1989 to 1993, she served as a missionary nurse in the jungles of Papua New Guinea — an experience that forged her clinical instincts amid profound resource scarcity and deepened her lifelong conviction that every person, regardless of circumstance, deserves skilled, compassionate care. That conviction is visible today in her work as a volunteer community parish nurse, where she founded a blood pressure screening clinic within her church’s monthly food pantry ministry — meeting vulnerable community members where they are, and delivering essential health monitoring, education, and guidance to people who might otherwise have none. She is now bringing this full breadth of experience — clinical, operational, educational, and ethical — to national executive leadership in hospice and palliative care, with an unwavering conviction that how we care for people at the end of life is one of the most consequential things a healthcare organization can get right.