Douglas County Visiting Nurses Assn.’s new executive director, Judith Bellome, is no stranger to health care issues.

She’s a registered nurse with a master’s degree in health education. She’s taught courses on home health techniques at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, Avila College, William Jewell College and MidAmerica Nazarene.

Since the late 1980s, she held administrative positions in regional home health care agencies in Kansas, Missouri and Georgia.

“From 1983 to 1993, I was executive director for Clinicare in Wyandotte County, which merged with the Visiting Nurses program in Kansas City,” Bellome said. “After they merged, they decided they only needed one director – I had the lesser tenure, so I had to leave.”

Bellome and her husband, John, an oral surgeon at the Kansas City Veterans Affairs Hospital, have lived in Kansas City for 30 years, though Judith Bellome commuted to Atlanta for three years, 1996 to 1999, while a vice president for a national home health firm based there.

She is a former board member of the National Association for Homecare and Hospice.

“When I saw that the Visiting Nurses in Lawrence was looking for a director, I put in my application,” Bellome said. “My husband and I love Lawrence. We come here a lot.”

Two of the couple’s three children, she said, graduated from Kansas University.

Bellome said she and her husband will move to Lawrence within six months.