Ana Valdes, the multilingual medical director at St. Anthony’s Medical Clinic, almost didn’t become a doctor.
Between her second and third years of in medical school at Tufts University, Valdes felt alienated by a system where academics and clinical consultations took the place of spending time with patients.
“I thought, ’I’m not interested, I made a mistake, it’s not the connection I thought it would be,’” said Valdes, who thought about dropping out.
But when she started volunteering with underserved communities near the university, “that was the turning point,” she recalls, “when I thought: This is what I want to do.”
Now, Valdes – who speaks Vietnamese, Spanish and Portuguese – is influencing the way health care is administered to San Francisco’s poorest and neediest living in the Tenderloin neighborhood, by emphasizing good health and eating habits through one-to-one contact. It’s not only about “putting out fires, but working on prevention – doing outreach not just around chronic diseases like diabetes and asthma, but on obesity and nutrition and how to live healthy,” she said.
Born in Chicago in 1967 to a Mexican-American father and a Vietnamese mother, Valdes moved to South Florida when she was 7; she became interested in sports medicine as a teenager and coached high school gymnastics to help put herself through college.
During her residency at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, Valdes worked on Indian reservations and did stints at even more remote clinics: in a Mexican town of 200 people in Copper Canyon, and on a coffee and rubber plantation near Lake Atitlan in Guatemala. Valdes attributes her propensity to help those in need to her Catholic father and Buddhist mother.
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In 1988, Valdes filled in for a doctor on maternity leave at St. Anthony’s. She was soon hired, and worked her way up to become the clinic’s medical director. One of her biggest achievements was helping synchronize St. Anthony’s electronic medical records with the coding system at San Francisco General Hospital, becoming the city’s first low-income clinic to do so.
Valdes is now overseeing a new breast health program she helped start last year, and hopes to start a program in 2012 that will screen for cervical and colon cancer as well.
“It’s that combination of inherent compassion and leadership that helped Ana create a cutting-edge model for our clinic,” says Shari Roeseler, St. Anthony’s executive director.
Ramon Maciel, a 60-year-old diabetic patient of Valdes’ who’s known her for 10 years, adds: “She’s the best doctor I’ve ever known.”
Valdes envisions collaborating with other organizations, clinics and diagnostic and specialty care units to make St. Anthony’s a patient center medical home unlike any other – or “the Kaiser for the uninsured,” she said.
Working with underserved populations, “the opportunity for growth and learning never ends,” Valdes said. “Even the small things you can do, for somebody who’s got nothing, can have an exponential impact on their lives.”