Meredith Salkey finally landed her dream job the week COVID shut everything down.

She had been working toward a role with Memorial Healthcare System since she was a teenager, volunteering there and in other health systems, networking, doing whatever it took to start her career at one of the largest healthcare systems in the country. She was hired to start on a Monday. By Friday, everyone was working from home indefinitely.

Most people would have been rattled. Not Meredith.

Within weeks, she was not only learning her role as a Program Administrator remotely, but building two brand new fellowship programs from scratch, training program directors who had no experience with ACGME, and organizing virtual interview practice sessions for program coordinators, administrators, and managers across the country. She didn't wait for someone to figure it out first. She convened a group, ran the sessions, and made connections she still has today.

It wasn't the first time she had led through a crisis. A few years earlier, while working as a Senior Clinical Advisor at Ross University School of Medicine, Hurricane Maria devastated the campus in Dominica. Meredith spent several days without sleep coordinating student evacuations, translating, and keeping families informed while caring for a one-year-old at home. She did not stop until everyone was accounted for.

Meredith sees problems before other people do, builds systems to address them, and does not quit.

Meredith currently serves as GME Program Administrator for three Cardiology subspecialty fellowship programs at HCA Florida JFK Hospital, where she manages daily operations, enacts improvements within the programs, and leads recruitment, in addition to many other tasks. Within just 7 months of employment at HCA, she was nominated for the 2025 HCA Healthcare GME Outstanding Program Administrator Award. She holds her C-TAGME certification and an MBA with a concentration in Public Administration. She is also the person on her team who organizes activities such as vision boards, champions wellness initiatives, and makes sure people remember why they do the work.

The first American-born child of a Haitian father and a Costa Rican mother, she grew up navigating three languages, three cultures, and a world her parents were still learning to understand. Translation, in every sense of the word, has been central to Meredith's life for as long as she can remember. It is no coincidence that she ended up in a field where so much of the work is helping people understand things that weren't written down for them.

As a mentor, Meredith brings the same clarity she brings to everything else: transparent about the hard parts, direct about what works, and deeply invested in helping people build the documentation habits, professional boundaries, and situational awareness that will protect them and their programs.