ROBERT PIERCE
• Leader & Times
Joanna Anchondo was born in El Paso, Texas, but spent most of her childhood in Liberal, where she has lived since 2000, graduating from Liberal High School later.
Following her time at LHS, Anchondo would go on to attend Seward County Community College and would go on to work in some local doctors’ offices.
About four years ago, Anchondo went to work for the Seward County Health Department, where she now works in the Maternal and Children’s Health (MCH) program.
Anchondo recently received the Home Visitor of the Year award from SCHD, and she said her job simply focuses on helping new mothers with their needs.
“My job is to give pregnant women the resources we have here in our community and help them out with their personal needs and see what we could do for their families as well,” she said.
Helping people is what Anchondo said drove her to finding work in the medical industry.
“The thought of being able to help people in the community and knowing there’s a lot of services we offer people don’t know and realize, they got me to where I’m at now,” she said. “It’s nice to know we have all these things available for people, and there are many people who don’t know about them.”
Home visitors, Anchondo said, either see patients in the health department’s offices or in facilities such as doctors’ offices and hospitals.
“We talk to them and see what their needs are and go from there as far as what can we assist them with – if they need things for the babies, for their families,” she said. “What we do is make sure if the family has a necessity, we meet those needs.”
Naturally, Anchondo said she was a little caught off guard with the Home Visitor of the Year award.
“I wasn’t expecting it for sure,” she said. “It was a surprise. It was a neat thing, but I was very excited for sure.”
Anchondo said the services the Home Visitor program provides are much needed in the area.
“I wish I had known of these services when I was a first-time parent,” she said. “They’re definitely helpful to people, and there’s a lot of people we reach out to not just in Seward County, but our surrounding counties. We reach out and refer to each other to help those people with needs.”
Anchondo called the need for the services she and others provide bigger than big.
“It’s definitely a great program for people in general,” she said. “There are a lot of services that are here for them.”
Anchondo started working with SCHD around the time of the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, and while things were rocky at first, the Home Visitor program continues to provide services to more people.
“At the beginning, it was a little bit of a challenge, but as the years have gone by, we’ve picked up on numbers,” she said. “When COVID hit, it was hard for us to go out to the hospital and other entities we normally work with. We were able to help more people once that started going away.”
Anchondo said she is just one of the people who make up a great team in the MCH department and SCHD as a whole.
“We are doing our best,” she said. “Our team is a pretty good team. We wouldn’t be what we are if it wasn’t for all of us doing our part and making it work for these people.”
