Welcome Gabriela Vanegas to the Division of Geriatrics!

Please welcome Gabriela Vanegas, Geriatrics Advance Care Planning Health Care Navigator, to the Division!

Gabriela will be primarily working with Drs. Christine Ritchie and Rebecca Sudore and the dynamic Advance Care Planning team within the Innovation and Implementation Center in Aging and Palliative Care Research in the UCSF Division of Geriatrics, Department of Medicine. As part of a UC system-wide study to improve advance care planning in primary care, Gabriela will work in partnership with patients to assist them in designating a surrogate decision maker, communicating their health care values and treatment preferences to their surrogates and clinicians, and helping to ensure these preferences are documented in the electronic health record.

Gabriela graduated from Menlo College with a Bachelor’s degree in Management.  While in school, Gabriela gained experience working with patients as an IHSS In Home Care Provider in San Francisco.  She also worked as a Patient Enrollment Coordinator and then a Project Manager at Medic Mobile in San Francisco.  Her expertise includes: empowering individuals to engage in medical decision making and the ability to tailor health education to patient’s needs, such as cultural differences and health literacy.  She later went on to become an Assistant Clinical Research Coordinator with the PREPARE Study where she implemented day-to-day research activities involving the development and implementation of advance care planning tools for English- and Spanish-speaking patients with limited health literacy.  For over 3 years, Gabriela recruited, consented and retained diverse English- and Spanish-speaking older adults in two randomized control trials from San Francisco General Hospital.  She is well-versed in discussing advance care planning and has navigated difficult conversations and emotions that can come up around the topic.  Gabriela is fluent in Spanish and helped to translate the PREPARE website into Spanish. Therefore, she really understands the needs of older adults with limited health literacy and the need to explore and tailor information to patients' individual family cultures.  Gabriela’s new role as Health Care Navigator in Geriatrics will certainly bring a positive impact to the team and to our patients.  We are very excited to welcome Gabriela on her first day (today).  She will be stationed at Laurel Heights, Suite 430 and can be reached by email: [email protected] or phone: 415-502-3709.  If you have a chance to meet her, please help me welcome her to our team!