Tracey-Anne Sokoloff was a nurse with a vision

Posted

It is with overwhelming sadness that the family of Tracey-Anne Sokoloff shares the news of her untimely passing after an 18-month heroic battle with metastatic breast cancer. She was 62.

The prognosis was dire 18 months ago but she battled, through peaks and valleys, which was her nature. She will be sorely missed by her mother Roslyn, her husband Sam, her sons Zach and Ben, her brother Mark, her sister Pam and many cousins, nephews, nieces and in-laws.

After graduating with degrees from Michigan and an RN degree and master’s degree in public health from Columbia, Ms. Sokoloff pursued a career in home care believing that she would be good at it and could make a difference in a field that she believed would become the new paradigm for health care delivery. She began as a visiting nurse with the Visiting Nurse Service, visiting new, young mothers in Harlem, having not yet had children of her own. After a few years, she moved up through management at VNS.

After a few intermediary stops, she then ran the home care office at Jacobi/Albert Einstein. One or two more interludes later, she began a 13-year career at Isabella Nursing Home, taking a smaller home care division and building it into the new, thriving, building of Isabella Home and Community Based Services on Broadway by the Columbia athletic fields. After running that office from its inception, she eventually departed and, for the last two to three years of her life, was the administrator of ElderServe, the certified home health agency for Hebrew Home/RiverSpring.

In 2009, the Home Care Association of NY, at its annual conference in Saratoga, gave Ms. Sokoloff its Advocacy Award, nicknamed the Giraffe Award for a person who “stuck their neck out” to improve the home care industry. To quote Dr. Linda Hollahan’s letter to nominate her, “Isabella’s leader is a woman who has more ideas about how home care needs to be delivered, more commitment to see those ideas manifest, and more energy to make it all happen than I remember any one person having.”

Although she will no longer be with us physically, she will be remembered by everyone she touched for her ubiquitous smile, robust, guttural, almost sinister laugh and joy for life unvarnished by numerous health battles. She gave birth to, and nurtured, two beautiful sons who are at different, successful stages of finding happiness in their career choices. Tracey will be missed by her family, the Riverdale family and the home care community for her aggressive efforts to deliver affordable home care.

Tracey-Anne Sokoloff