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Campus News
     
Your faculty and staff news since 1965
Special Spotlight Issue:  April 22, 2002

Jersey native is Student Health's good fella

By Carolyn Gonzales

Ron BesanteTony Soprano he’s not, although he and the TV mobster share a common Italian ancestry and hail from New Jersey. Ron Besante, nurse manager at the Student Health Center (SHC), gives shots, but doesn’t shoot, and he cares for rather than kills people.

Besante has worked at UNM for more than 20 years, first at University Hospital (UH) and now at SHC, where he and 12 nurses staff the clinic. A certified emergency room nurse, he still works weekends at the hospital as the house supervisor. “I’m the administrator they call if they need someone after hours,” he says. “I still enjoy patient care more than being a bureaucrat,” noting that he also does scheduling and safety education.

But, working on a master’s in public administration, he’s in training for fulltime status as a bureaucrat.

“I have 12 to 15 hours left,” he says. His plan is to move into hospital management.

How does a Jersey man end up in New Mexico? A court-ordered stint in the Navy at 17 landed him in boot camp in Orlando, Fla., where he met three Taos Indians. “They talked to me about New Mexico and it intrigued me. Then, when I was a Navy medic stationed in Connecticut, my first charge nurse, Mike Shannon, was from Albuquerque. He forced me to come out here,” he says. Shannon works at University Hospital as an emergency room nurse.

Despite his naval background, it was a colonel who motivated him to get an education. “I worked at Kentucky Fried Chicken when I was in high school. I swore I’d never do that again,” he says. Besante earned his undergraduate degree at Regents College in New York.

At the SHC, Besante and Co. mostly see students for allergies, cold, flu, minor injuries, bicycle accidents, asthma and stomach viruses.

“A Lobo ID is all you need. The price students pay depends on whether or not they’re full or part time,” he says. They see between 80-100 students a day at the walk-in urgent care and the primary doctors see 100-150 students a day. “We have six doctors and seven mid levels, physician assistants and nurse practitioners,” he says.

The SHC employs work-study students. “We have them filing paperwork and stocking. It’s a great place for students to work who are interested in entering the medical profession,” he says.

Besante says that the nurses who work at the SHC and at UH could probably earn 30-40 percent more if they were to work elsewhere. “We can’t compete with the private sector incentives. We have to find those individuals who enjoy working with students because it’s not all about the money,” he says.

The nursing shortage does affect UNM, he says. “The hospital was short seven nurses last weekend,” he says, and he had difficulty filling the last nursing vacancy at the SHC.

Besante enjoys what he’s doing and where he is and his philosophy is not to obsess over things or take them too seriously. “Like my grandmother told me, ‘Take a job you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.’”

He has an incentive to offer SHC employees. “I cook a lot,” he says. “I have pasta days. People will kick in a few dollars and they get all the pasta and salad they can eat.” Among his specialties are Greek and balsamic vinaigrette salads, he says, pointing to a display of vinegars and seasonings on the corner of his desk.

Also on his desk are treasures students have given him. They lend a museum quality to his office. A calimba, or thumb piano from the Kalahari Desert, and an okrina, or clay flute, from Peru, are displayed. He picks up a minstrel figurine. “I just finished writing a letter to the U.S. Embassy in Uzbekistan on behalf of the student who gave me this.”

He says he enjoys working with students, partly because he has college-aged children. “My daughter Melissa is graduating from UNM in May,” he says. She started on the lottery scholarship and is finishing on the dependent education benefit. His daughter Mary Jane is a Southwest Airlines flight attendant.

His son, John, is a freshman at Albuquerque High and the youngest child James is an 8th grader at Jefferson Middle School. His wife, Mary Jane, is a kindergarten teacher at Los Padillas.

Besante’s family commutes to Albuquerque from Belen each day for school and work. Life is good in Belen. For a while, they had a goat. “It was a tax write off as a grazing animal on farm land,” he says. Now they have no goat, but a swimming pool. “I don’t recommend that anyone have one. It’s a lot of work,” he says.

New Mexico has grown on the Besantes, but they do get back to New Jersey occasionally.

“We go visit family, but after 20 minutes on the turnpike and paying 10 tolls we want to come running back to New Mexico,” he says.

Reflecting, he says, “If that judge hadn’t told me to join the Navy, I would probably be dead or in prison.”

“If you feel good about what you’re doing, you sleep well at night. My family loves me. I’m the richest man on earth,” he says.