Ballweg, Ruth

Ruth Ballweg, MPA, PA-C

Ruth Ballweg, MPA, PA-C (1944 - ) is the Associate Professor and Director of the MEDEX Northwest Physician Assistant Division in the Department of Family Medicine at the University of Washington, School of Medicine, and was one of the first formally-trained physician assistants in southern Oregon. In addition, Ms Ballweg was the editor and contributor to the first American textbook written on PA training.  

Prior to entering MEDEX as a student, she was a childbirth educator, breastfeeding counsellor, and medical social worker. She was a leader in the childbirth education/alternative birthing movement in the Oregon and worked with her colleagues to create the first approved hospital-based Alternative Birth Center at Ashland Community Hospital in 1976.

Ms. Ballweg moved to Bremerton, Washington in 1980 and was the first PA employed at the Bremerton-Kitsap County Health Department. Her assignments included family planning, sexually transmitted diseases, jail health, immigrant health, and maternal child health clinics. She and nurse practitioner Cathy Cornell, PNP, enhanced health care access in Bremerton through satellite clinics and health education programs.  

In 1981, Ms. Ballweg returned to MEDEX as a faculty member at a time of great turmoil in the program. In response to national health policy documents predicting an oversupply of physicians (the GMENAC Report), the Washington State Medical Association (a founder of the MEDEX program) had voted internally to “dismantle” MEDEX. Ruth was tasked with identifying strategies to reverse this decision, including the coordination of a health policy conference designed to highlight new roles for physician assistants. That conference served as a model for subsequent conferences focusing on workforce policies to expand the physician assistant workforce. Ms. Ballweg became the Director of MEDEX in 1985 at a time when PAs were emerging as directors of PA programs. During her tenure, the program has grown from accepting 20 students for a one-year certificate program to a multiple-training site program that admits 110 students annually for either a bachelors or masters degree option (24 or 27 months, respectively). As the only medical school serving the five north western states and – 27% of the US landmass – the University of Washington includes MEDEX in its regional activities. As a result, Ms. Ballweg is actively engaged in health workforce issues in Washington, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, and Alaska. MEDEX also maintains involvement with rural communities in Oregon and Nevada. Within the School of Medicine she serves on the Medical School Executive Committee, the Executive Admissions Committee, the Regional Affairs Committee and the Graduate Medical Education Committee. Her national assignments for MEDEX have focused on the expansion of the primary care workforce through her involvement in the Pew Health Professions Commission, the National Advisory Council to the National Health Services Corps, the Primary Health Policy Fellowship, and HRSA’s Title VII Advisory Committee.  

In addition, through her role at MEDEX, Ms. Ballweg has been working on a Dental Health Therapy Project in collaboration with the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium since 2005. Her shared leadership activities involve the development of the program’s competency-based training infrastructure including recruitment, selection, professional role issues and the development of a supervisory model. She has spoken at the Institute of Medicine’s Oral Health Summit, written for oral health education journals, and presented about the role of dental therapists at national and international conferences. 

Beyond MEDEX, Ms. Ballweg works extensively with national and regional leaders in the PA, family medicine, and nursing communities and serves as a consultant for health care organizations on interdisciplinary primary care teams. Ms. Ballweg served as an elected trustee for Group Health Cooperative –which serves over 600,000 consumer members in Washington State. She was Chair of the Board in 2005 and 2006 and also served for six years as the Chair of the Advisory Committee of Group Health’s Center for Health Studies. She is a past president of the Association of Physician Assistant Programs (now PAEA) and the Washington Academy of Physician Assistants; and she is an Advisor to the Washington State Medical Quality Assurance Commission. From 2002-2008, she served as a PA director-at-large on the Board of Directors of the National Commission on Certification of Physician Assistants (NCCPA). Subsequently, she was an inaugural member of the Board of Directors of the NCCPA Foundation (2006-2011).  

In her role as a PA educator, Ms. Ballweg has served as a site visitor and/or consultant to many US PA programs. She has continued to serve on a variety of PAEA committees and task forces related to research, governmental affairs, and international strategies.  

Her efforts in support of the international development of the PA profession – where adaptation rather than adoption is key – are facilitated and supported through her role as Director of International Relations for NCCPA. In this role, she has facilitated two international meetings focusing of certification and regulatory issues. In addition, she has worked with governments and universities in Canada, the UK, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Switzerland, Ghana, Mozambique, Ireland and China to promote the physician assistant concept.  

Ms. Ballweg has been a leader of the Society for the Preservation of Physician Assistant History since its inception in 2001. She served as the first secretary and has subsequently served several terms as president, emphasizing the important of remembering the profession’s past to secure its future.  

Acknowledgments: This biographical sketch was prepared by Ruth Ballweg and submitted to the Society on January 2012. The first photograph is courtesy of Ruth Ballweg.