Sarah Prentanvil

Sarah was primarily raised within the local San Diego communities. Sarah is now the Community Care Manager for the California Department of Health Care Services – Home and Community Based Alternatives Medi-Cal Waiver (HCBA Waiver) program administered by San Ysidro Health throughout the entire County of San Diego.  In this role, Sarah has oversight of the provision of a comprehensive solution for a large segment of our at-risk and high utilization Medi-Cal patient populations, allowing for close management and securing of services to enable them to be safely transitioned from an institutional setting, or to prevent them from such a fate.

Sarah’s academic background includes degrees in Social Work, Biology, Health Sciences (Public Health and Registered Nursing) and a graduate degree in Epidemiology. Sarah completed a Clinical and Translational Research fellowship at Harvard Medical School, where she worked to improve health outcomes in under-served populations throughout greater Boston. She has been recognized by San Diego State University and California State University system as a top academic Public Health Researcher and was a primary team member on a very successful public health program for refugee health, which informed the CDC, resulting in national empiric guidelines for care of refugee patient populations. She is an active member of organizations which serve the community, such as the Illustrious Sigma Gamma Rho Sorority, Inc., NAACP San Diego Branch Executive Committee, Neighborhood House Association Board or Directors and is a member of the Sensational San Diego Chapter of Jack and Jill of America, Inc. She has been an integral support for a variety of community programs, including but not limited to: Creating a free community-based CPR certification program, Blue Heart Foundation, FANCY DETOUR, Black Infant Health, American Indian Recruitment Program, San Diego Breastfeeding Center Foundation, Heart Beat Music and Performance Academy, Young and Prosperous and a recidivism reduction program, Building Justice: HoMEwork. Sarah has also served as “Doc 4 a Day” at Lincoln High School and as the co-founder and chair of the San Ysidro Health Black SOUL Employee Resource Group, she has collaboratively created the annual “Morse High School Free Sports Physicals” event broadly serving youth athletes in Southeast San Diego.

Professionally, Sarah has over 20 years of experience working in social services and health care for various community/global health programs (County of San Diego, Indian Health Council, Rady Children’s, refugee health, migrant camps in Mexico, emergency response nurse in Haiti following the 2010 earthquake); some of her recent work includes surgical quality initiatives in neurosurgery, cardiology, orthopedics, and co-authored publications in World Neurosurgery in February 2019 and Journal of Healthcare Quality in July 2020.  She is a positive mentor and friend to all she engages, personifying her motto, “From the community and for the community!”