Ana M. Valles-Medina, RN, MPH

Universidad Autónoma de Baja California

Tijuana, Baja California, Mexico 22350 

Biography

Ana M. Valles-Medina is a Mexican registered nurse that holds a master's degree in public health, graduating with honors in both degrees. She has been working in education for more than 15 years, teaching and training healthcare professionals. In her profession, Ms. Valles has also had experience in healthcare program design, communications and public relations. She has conducted several binational healthcare research projects, focusing on HIV and West Nile Virus. She also has worked as a research evaluator of several protocols, and she has coordinated several educational programs and community activities. Currently Ms. Valles is a full-time professor at UABC School of Medicine and the coordinator for the universities Public Health Postgraduate Program in Tijuana, Mexico.

Leadership Development Opportunities

I was invited to participate in EPHLI by the U.S.-Mexico Border Health Commission. It has been a delight to attend this institute because I had the opportunity to meet many US health system leaders. I also had the great opportunity to learn how to use systems thinking methodology and the logic model tool. The most important thing for me was to learn that in order to be a better leader I have to work on being a better person. I considered myself an "almost perfect" team worker, but with all the tests we did, I learned that everybody has different "Change Style" Preferences and different Skillscope scores. I understand many new things about diversity and how important it is to include even those you think don't have anything to bring to the table.  My EPHLI project taught me that we can observe different perspectives of the same problem and we need to understand why some issues are important for some and different for others. Utilization of archetypes helped us to analyze a problem in a better descriptive and graphic way and also make better decisions in order to optimize the efforts and resources.