Career Paths
Features
From Escort Translator to Peer Specialist: How Waldina Palacios Found Her Dream Job
April 9, 2024–As a peer specialist with VNS Health’s Intensive Mobile Treatment (IMT) team, Waldina Palacios provides help to vulnerable, unhoused New Yorkers who are navigating severe mental health challenges. This means meeting them wherever they may be living—in a shelter, a single-room occupancy residence (SRO), a hospital, or on the streets. Over more than two decades, Waldina has held many positions at VNS Health, including escort translator, home health aide, and HHA coordinator. During this time, Waldina also experienced VNS Health as a family member – her grandmother was a patient in the Shirley Goodman and Himan Brown Hospice Residence near East 96th Street. (“The place felt like home,” says Waldina. “So cozy and comfortable. Everyone there gave her such good care.”) Waldina’s current role with the Behavioral Health team, she says, is her dream job. It’s also one she didn’t even know existed until recently. Here, in her own words,
Seeking New Opportunities with RN Tameka McCabe
March 19, 2024–18 years ago, Tameka McCabe joined VNS Health as a fundraiser coordinator on the Development Department team. Today, Tameka is Director of Wound Management for Home Care. How did she go from fundraising to wound management? For starters, Tameka likes to seek out new opportunities. It also helps that she works for an organization that encourages team members to take advantage of career path opportunities. Here, in her own words, is Tameka’s career path story. My First Six Years at VNS Health I started at VNS Health in 2006 as a fundraising coordinator. I’d been doing marketing at an insurance company before that, but I was ready to move to health care, which had always been an interest of mine. When VNS Health hired me to work in in their Development office, I knew I could apply the skills I’d acquired in marketing to fundraising. Over my six years
From HHA to RN: Donna Wilson’s Inspiring Journey
August 15, 2023–When Clinical Care Manager Donna Wilson started working as a home health aide (HHA) at VNS Health, she had a vision that she would one day become a registered nurse (RN). As a child growing up in Guyana, health care became her passion thanks to her paternal grandmother, who was a nurse. Her grandmother would often take Donna with her to work, where she mostly cared for elderly patients. “That’s where my love for the geriatric population began,” says Donna. “That feeling continues today. I have a love for seniors, and the sentiment seems to be mutual.” From HHA to RN Donna served as a teacher and an assistant tax inspector in Guyana prior to moving to the United States in 1989. In the U.S., she worked in insurance and banking before becoming an HHA in Personal Care (then known as Partners in Care). Donna was drawn to the position