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Fort Dodge native is featured in health care film

Cameras followed Ruge for ‘The Providers’

-Submitted photo
Chris Ruge, a Fort Dodge native who is a nurse practitioner in New Mexico, pauses while visiting patients in their homes recently.

Fort Dodge native Chris Ruge is a vital source of help for people in a sprawling area of rural New Mexico who are battling chronic illness, mental health problems and addictions.

Ruge is a nurse practitioner who said he gravitates toward some of the most complicated patients a health care provider can treat.

He spends part of his time in an El Centro Family Health clinic and part of it on the road, making home visits to check on people dealing with everything from heart disease to heroin addiction.

And for part of the last three years, he was shadowed by documentary film makers as he went about his duties.

“They ended up with 400-some hours of video,” Ruge said in a phone interview. “And they did what documentary makers do and somehow whittled that down.”

The result is a film called “The Providers” which features Ruge and a handful of his colleagues. It will air on Iowa Public Television at 9 p.m. Monday.

“We had a lot of faith in their ability to tell the truth,” Ruge said of the film’s makers, Laura Green and Anna Moot-Levin.

“We just kind of got used to having them around.”

The patients that Ruge and his colleagues care for are also part of the film.

“They just caught how difficult a road people fighting addiction are on and the toll it takes on the people around them,” he said.

All patients had to sign a release to be part of the film. Ruge said most of the patients agreed to take part in it.

“They thought it was a valuable thing for their stories to be told,” he said.

Ruge has worked for El Centro Family Health since 2008. A clinic in Las Vegas, New Mexico, is his base of operations, but he spends five to 10 hours a week checking on patients in their homes.

He specializes in patients who have multiple conditions, including things like heart disease, kidney disease, diabetes, mental illness, alcoholism and drug addiction.

“Addiction is a big one,” he said.

Ruge’s parents, Dick and Adeline Ruge, still live in the Round Prairie neighborhood, just around the corner from the house he grew up in. His father owned Ruge Electric.

He graduated from Fort Dodge Senior High in 1971, then moved to Greeley, Colorado. After about a year, he returned to Iowa and enrolled in the University of Iowa in Iowa City. He earned a bachelor’s degree in Spanish and drove a truck during the summers.

After graduation, he became a full-time truck driver and spent a lot of time in Arizona and New Mexico.

Ruge eventually thought he’d like to become a paramedic. But when he talked to a paramedic instructor, he was advised that nursing would be a better choice for him.

He earned a bachelor’s degree in nursing from the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque and has been in the nursing profession since 1989.

“It’s a pretty unique and easy way to help people and then you get paid for it,” Ruge said. “It’s kind of like Christmas all year round. I’ve always found it real rewarding.”

Early in his nursing career he worked at a hospital on a Navajo reservation near Chinle, Arizona. He met his wife, Ann Bosley Ruge, who is a nurse midwife, while working there.

Later, he went to the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, Massachusetts, to earn a master’s degree in nursing. He worked in an inner city clinic and then became the first employee of Commonwealth Care Alliance, which provided intensive home-based care for AIDS patients. At that time, there were no effective medicines to treat the disease, and patients generally died within six months of entering the care program.

“It was people that were really desperate and were dying of a disease that had a lot of stigma,” Ruge said. “You were their one dependable person in their life.”

After working for that agency, Ruge took a year off to travel with his family. They then settled in New Mexico, where he resumed his nursing career.

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