By Nathaniel Herz, Alaska Public Media – Anchorage – February 23, 2021
Andy Teuber, the president of the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium, has resigned, the organization said Tuesday.
“The chairman and president of the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium resigned this morning. The consortium’s board of directors is taking immediate and swift action, calling a special meeting for this afternoon to address leadership transition,” Shirley Young, an ANTHC spokesperson, wrote in an email Tuesday afternoon.
Andy Teuber (University of Alaska)
The nonprofit consortium is an umbrella group that coordinates health care for Alaska Native people and helps run the Anchorage Native hospital. It’s also one of the state’s largest employers, with more than 3,000 workers.
Teuber has been ANTHC’s president since 2008, and he also serves as chief executive of Kodiak’s tribal health care provider, the Kodiak Area Native Association, where officials said they had no comment Tuesday.
Teuber sat on the University of Alaska Board of Regents, as well, though he also resigned that position Tuesday, effective immediately, said university spokeswoman Roberta Graham.
Teuber is being replaced as president by Garvin Federenko, who previously held an executive job at ANTHC, said Young. His position as chair of ANTHC’s board is being filled by Bernice Kaigelak through the end of Teuber’s term in December.
Young’s email did not say what prompted Teuber’s resignation, and Teuber didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
This is the second, recent high-profile tribal health resignation.
Katherine Gottlieb, the former chief executive of Southcentral Foundation resigned in August. Southcentral Foundation cares for Native people in the Anchorage area and in parts of rural Alaska, and it partners with ANTHC to run the Anchorage Native hospital.
Gottlieb’s resignation came two weeks after her foundation fired three dentists, including her husband Kevin Gottlieb, who was also a senior executive at the organization.
The dentists were alleged to have falsified health records to show a different provider had conducted a number of routine dental exams than the practitioner who’d done the work.