Preventative care drives Gardner nurse

Keeping watch on heart, stroke and diabetes patients in ICU motivated Angela Rupp, ARNP, to change the course of her career.

“I wanted to do more,” said Rupp, nurse practitioner at Gardner Family Care in Gardner, Kan. “Why couldn’t somebody help them more; do something preventative?”

Rupp helped keep comfortable patients with multiple complications from heart and lung disease, diabetes, and strokes who often died from these preventable diseases.

“I saw them at the end of the line,” Rupp said.

Rupp joined other nurses in a campaign to help prevent disease. With degrees in nutrition and nursing, she combined her skills to become an expert in preventive care. While earning her degree to become a nurse practitioner at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, Rupp focused on prevention of heart disease and diabetes.

“I did all that and family care,” she said.

As a nurse practitioner at Gardner Family Care she sees patients of all ages and frequently incorporates her own life experiences into discussions with patients.

“I am aggressive,” she said. “They need to be involved in their own health care.”

She weaves stories from her own life, like a former battle with weight, into frank discussions with patients. She runs blood work, glucose tests and cholesterol levels on her patients and said the numbers can act as a big motivator.

“They need to be scared,” she said.

Rupp tells patients it is hard work to stick to a healthy plan, but sets an example by maintaining a healthy weight and incorporating running into her daily life.

“I do what I say they should do,” she said.

Rupp’s mission is to keep people healthy. She wants patients to experience a quality life, take care of themselves, and exercise good judgment with meal planning and exercise. She said if she can teach them to make healthy choices, they can avoid heart attacks, strokes, diabetes and lung disease.

She admits getting patients to listen can be challenging.

“We’ve become such a lazy society,” she said. “We don’t exercise and we don’t diet.”

Rupp said she treats patients for everything under the sun and sometimes surprises them with a discussion about their weight, blood pressure or smoking habit when they come in for poison ivy or a sore throat.

“We try to promote prevention,” she said.

Mary Ryan, nurse practitioner at Kansas City Family Medical Care, St. Joseph Medical Center, also sees patients for a variety of reasons. She specialized in rheumatology, bones and joints and understands the direct impact of patients who weigh too much.

“Obesity directly impacts all of the joint issues,” she said.

Ryan said 10 or more cancers are directly related to obesity, in addition to coronary disease, arthritis and diabetes. She wants her patients to understand that certain diseases don’t just happen because they are unlucky.

“Tremendous research shows that is not true,” she said. “It (obesity) changes hormones in the body.”

For preventive measures and a healthy life, Ryan counsels patients to maintain a realistic weight and plan an exercise they enjoy so it becomes a daily habit. She tells patients to eat a colorful diet of fruits and vegetables and less of the white foods like pasta, noodles and rice.

“We want orange, green, red and blue,” she said. “The more colorful, the better.”

She recommends eating meat three to four times a week in portions the size of a deck of cards. She said people need to know their blood pressure, cholesterol and bone density and schedule regular pap smears, mammograms, colonoscopies and vaccines.

“Adults need to know routine maintenance,” she said.

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