Dame Claire Bertschinger, DBE, DL (born 1953) is an Anglo-Swiss nurse and advocate on behalf of suffering people in the developing world.
[1] After her parents got a television in the 1960s, one of the first films she watched was The Inn of the Sixth Happiness starring Ingrid Bergman playing the role of Gladys Aylward, an English missionary to China in the 1930s who is caught up in the Japanese invasion.
[6] After training and working as a nurse in the UK, Bertschinger became a medic on Operation Drake, an expedition with Colonel John Blashford-Snell and the Scientific Exploration Society in Panama, Papua New Guinea and Sulawesi.
After this experience, she joined the emergency disaster relief group of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), allowed to attend war locations thanks to her dual-nationality.
Through this she has worked in over a dozen zones of conflict including Afghanistan, Kenya, Lebanon, Sudan, Sierra Leone, Ivory Coast and Liberia.
Bertschinger is an ambassador and Trustee for The African Children's Educational Trust,[7] Patron for Promise Nepal,[8] and a voluntary worker for the charity Age UK.
"[1][13] Buerk's initial news report on Bertschinger's work, which was broadcast on 23 October 1984, inspired the watching Bob Geldof to launch Band Aid.