In her role as Community Outreach Specialist at St. Catherine Hospital, Khisha Anderson has above average skills for organizing and connecting the hospital and the community. Anderson began her current position at St. Catherine Hospital in East Chicago, Indiana in 2007. She has more than fifteen years in the healthcare field that began with her passion to become a psychiatrist.
However, her goal was short lived when she was assigned as an assistant to work with a psychiatrist for one week. Anderson said after eight hours, she decided that this was not what she was interested in. In 1996, Anderson began working with Healthy Start inside St. Catherine for two years working with family planning, educating women on wellness, taking care of their bodies, fertility, and the importance self-examination.
Two years later, in 1998, Anderson started working in Chicago at John H. Stroger Jr. Hospital as a public health educator where she worked with group education focusing on health topics for women and men and as an instructor for workers in Community Health Education.
During this time, she also coordinated public health programs, co-wrote planning grants and served on the Cook County Bureau of Health Services Patient and Family Education Task Force.
Returning to St. Catherine in 2007, Anderson became responsible for design and implementation of community health programs and educational services. She also coordinates physician speaking engagements, sets up the health fairs and serves a resource to community organizations for the hospital.
Although Anderson expertly handles her many roles with ease, she attributes her military background for teaching her organizational skills. While attending Westside High School in Gary, Indiana, as a junior, she joined the U.S. Army Reserves, attending basic training in infantry and artillery at Ft. Jackson, NC during the summer.
The following year she went to Texas for three months where she learned to work on building portable hospitals, developed an orientation booklet for the department and became an instructor for transportation of a portable hospitals. Anderson served as a Weekend Warrior contributing twelve years of duty, receiving an honorable discharge in 2001.
Anderson shifted her focus from psychology to health sciences and received a Bachelors of Science from Ball State in 1994. In 2001, she received her Masters of Public Affairs from Indiana University Northwest in 2001.
In 2014, Anderson was awarded Franciscan Alliance’s Influential Women of Northwest Indiana Award for Up and Coming Women in Healthcare. This award honors women who are making a difference in their businesses, industries, and communities in and around Northwest Indiana.
Anderson said she was surprised to be nominated in 2013, but did not win. She was surprised to be nominated a second time in 2014 but did not expect to win. Anderson says the experience was just as surprising and humbling the second time adding that she felt as if she had won an Oscar. She says she does not do the job for accolades or recognition; she just appreciates hearing that she did a good job.
Summing up her skills, Anderson says she considers the health field intriguing. Her job allows her mobility and the ability to focus more on developing partnerships, relations and to be able to provide information. She says she is a bit challenged on the technology side and jokes about working with social media while still holding on to her date book.
"It’s a generational thing she says, I was blessed to be born to be able to do it both ways. Before you programmed one room and now you can use your phone to program the whole house."
Anderson says in her current role her focus is to address anyone who can be a potential patient of the hospital. In the future, she wants to work on developing better relations with churches because of their captive audiences, fulfilling the needs of the congregations relating to spiritual, physical and emotional health.
In addition to her multi-faceted position, Anderson also serves as a volunteer on the Board of Directors of Multicultural Wellness Network/MOTTEP, Inc. and works with various governmental and community-based organizations improving the health care in Northwest Indiana. She enjoys spending time with husband Victor and four children, Kristen, age 9, Victor, age 13, Victoria 24 and Yeishia, 28.