When Finance Director Nancy Friesen stated working at the Monticello-Big Lake Hospital, now CentraCare Health Monticello  45 years ago, a gallon of gas cost 36 cents and Richard Nixon was president.

 

“It was a different world back then,” said Nancy, who retires at the end of the month. “But I always loved my job.”

 

Nancy came to Minnesota from South Dakota, where she began her career with one year of college at the University of South Dakota for nurses training.”

 

“At the end of the first year I had no money so I had to drop out,” Friesen said.

 

She moved from South Dakota to Minneapolis and took a job in an office while she went to business school for four years. In 1970, she started working for the hospital district. Her pay was $2.65 per hour.

 

“I had to do all my calculations on my adding machine,” Nancy recalled. “We didn’t even have calculators.”

 

Nancy and Karen Lindgren went downtown to purchase the first computers used at the hospital in 1981. They brought back three of them, with single-sided disk drives and 64K of RAM.

 

Nancy married and moved into the house she now occupies in 1978. Red Owl and Nelson’s Fairway were the only grocery stores in town. At 6 p.m. most stores closed. She raised two boys, who were born in the hospital. At different times both her sons have worked there, (one still does), and both her daughters-in-law.

 

“It has been kind of a family,” Nancy said. “I knew everybody in the hospital then, all the nurses, working all three shifts.

 

When she started, the doctors taking care of people in the area were Dr. Maus, Dr. Zapf and Dr. Bentine. Dr. Sutherland, who recently retired, started in 1983. Most specialists then came from Mercy Hospital in Coon Rapids.

 

“The doctors did everything then, from clinic hours to ER to surgery and delivering babies,” Nancy said. “Dr. Sutherland delivered a lot of babies.” 

 

“In those days sometimes it would snow so hard no one could get to work. We all pitched in and did what had to be done. I have done everything from patient care to folding laundry,” she recalled. “We had to send snowmobiles out to get people. We were all generalists back then.”

 

“As the hospital has grown, we have become more specialized,” she said. “I don’t know everybody any more. But we were all here for the patient, whether you were the cook, doing the laundry or just washing the floor. And we still are. It’s nice to see that kind of teamwork.”

 

Changes in healthcare come in waves and in her experience, ideas are cyclical, Friesen said. Once hospital reimbursement was based on managed care, then patient choice, then came accountable care again in an effort to control costs.

 

Changes in payment systems, technology and patient expectations, along with changes in delivery of healthcare with urgent care and minute clinics springing up in stores like Target and Coborn’s all impact the hospital, yet the need for the basic infrastructure remains, she said.

 

“One of the things I am most proud of is that we provided quality care and we moved forward with the times, from the small independent hospital we were to what has happened in the last two years with CentraCare,” Friesen said. “We have had super people working here.”

 

“One reason for that is the location of the hospital, set between the Twin Cities and St. Cloud,” she said. “We have been very fortunate in recruiting doctors and staff because of our location.”

 

Over the years, Nancy became the unofficial historian of the hospital, keeping copies of contracts, newspaper articles, photographs and other memorabilia neatly stored in well-marked files in her office. She has handed these off to Public Relations Specialist Joni Pawelk for safe keeping.

 

“Nancy is an excellent historian and she is a real asset to the organization,” Pawelk said.

 

While Friesen is looking forward to not having to shovel out her driveway at 5 a.m. to get to work by 7 a.m. this winter, she decided not to cut the cord completely and volunteered to serve as Monticello Township’s representative to the district board. Her first meeting will be Nov. 19.

 

Nancy says she has no great plans for her retirement, beyond sitting at her window with her cup of coffee in the morning to see if the snow will melt before she has to get the snowblower out.

 

She spent some time traveling to Australia and New Zealand with her husband before he passed away. She enjoys spending time with her dog, Benji. she likes to read and she likes to fish. She is the vice chair of her church congregation, a lake association member and has five granddaughters. She has tentative plans for a road trip next year - maybe.

 

“I have been truly blessed to work in a field I love, doing healthcare and finance,” Nancy said. “I am happy I have been able to do something worthwhile for the community behind the scenes.”

 

“I have really enjoyed all the years I have spent with the hospital district, but I think the board made a good decision when they decided to go with CentraCare. Their culture and their values are a good fit for our community and our organization,” Friesen said.

 

Things have changes a lot over the years and there will be plenty more changed to come in the future as the move is more towards outpatient treatment and community health, with patients playing a much bigger role in their own healthcare decisions.

 

“It just seemed like time to let someone else worry about it now,” Nancy said.