KAREN:  So as administrator, what was your role? 

ROY:  My role was -- was primarily to hire and -- and supervise the staff in a -- in a management sense or in a leadership sense.  I was in charge of the budget and -- and all the programmatic reporting and -- and accounting that needed to be done. 

The -- the medical side of it actually, though, received the medical supervision from a medical doctor, and a -- and a high level nurse trainer that was in charge of the other nurse trainers. 

KAREN:  Uh-hum. 

ROY:  And so they -- you know, they had -- they did all the medical input, they fashioned the policies, of course, always discussing them with me.
 
But I -- I guess it was a very -- it was a situation where everybody had to consider themselves a member of the team, and -- and the very strict authoritarian boss worker kind of a -- of a organization didn't work there. 
It had to be very participative, very egalitarian, in order to make it work because, you know, well-trained medical people don't like to think of themselves as being just another worker, they are a pretty skillful person or persons, and they should be treated accordingly.  And they have their professionals -- professions that -- and skills that I don't know anything about, you know. 

I'm -- I'm just a business major and I run budgets and plans and do strategies and -- and write reports and hire people and counsel people and let them cry on my shoulder, things like that, you know what managers do.  Leaders do, I guess.  They say you manage assets and you lead people.  At least that's what business school taught me. 

KAREN:  That's what they taught you.

ROY:  But in those days, yeah, it worked really well.  We all had a good relationship with each other.  We all talked through our problems, worked them out.  It was a very exciting time. 

It was a very exciting time to see that with such a small budget, and I believe it was less than 2 million at the time, we were impacting 90 percent of the primary health care delivered throughout rural Alaska --

KAREN:  Wow. 

ROY:  -- with using the residents, the indigenous people themselves to provide the services. 

And I thought it was, you know, wow, this was -- this was really something that -- that you could dream about but didn't often happen, you know.  And here it was happening. 

And the aides were happy.  They were doing what they liked to do.  They were receiving the training.  They are always a respected individual in their community.  And it was always great fun to -- it gave -- it gave you a great sense of accomplishment if you were involved in the program at any level, you know, that this was all happening and you were impacting positively so many lives.  Saving many, as well.