Christi Rondeau
When
this article was published, Christi Rondeau, Turtle
Mountain Tribe of Chippewa Indians, PharmD, RPh, was
chief pharmacist at Belcourt Indian Hospital (Quentin
N. Burdick Memorial Health Care Facility) located in
Belcourt on the Turtle Mountain Indian Reservation.
Experiencing the Need for More Pharmacists
Christi
Rondeau, Pharm D, RPh, and her staff are acutely aware of
the shortage in pharmacists. “We have two pharmacies,” says
Rondeau. “One is an outpatient based pharmacy and the other
is an inpatient pharmacy. We fill up to 800 plus
prescriptions a day. To be fully staffed, we need 15
pharmacists. Currently we have three permanent pharmacists
and five technicians. Robots help with tasks, such as
getting a drug and putting it into a bottle, but robots
can’t counsel patients or do other human tasks.
“I spend a lot of my weekends and evenings here," admits
Rondeau. So does her husband, Tom Rondeau, Turtle Mountain
Tribe of Chippewa Indians, who is a certified, licensed
pharmacy technician. “He’s a big plus here,” Rondeau says.
“We want to be able to do more counseling of patients, so
Tom helped me clean up a room that was being used as a
stockroom. We put a desk and patient information in there.
I hope that before too long we’ll have more staff, so that
we can do a lot more counseling. For now we do the best we
can.”
Daily
Responsibilities
Every day, nurses bring Rondeau and her staff piles of
patient charts. They check the physicians’ prescriptions
for potential problems and then provide patients with the
appropriate medications in the correct dosage. Like other
health professionals, the pharmacists enter information and
notes into the patients’ charts. The pharmacists consult
regularly with physicians, but they don’t have enough staff
to be able to “round” with the doctors, as Jeff Maxon and
his colleagues do at Parker.
As chief pharmacist, Rondeau has administrative
responsibilities, for example, hiring and supervising
staff, formulating policies, and updating the formulary - a
list of medications that has been systematically reviewed
and approved for use. She is also responsible for
accounting for all of the narcotics.
This is the second time that Rondeau has worked at the
Belcourt Indian Hospital. When she received her PharmD.
from North Dakota State University in 2000, she worked at
Belcourt for a year. Then, because of their desire to see
another part of the world, Christi, Tom and their two
children moved to Yakima, Washington where Christi worked
at the Indian Health Service and Tom trained to become
certified as a pharmacy technician. “I learned a lot out
there because they do things differently than we do here,”
says Rondeau . “But after 9 months we came back to Belcourt
because my children missed their grandma, relatives, and
school.” Still Christi was able to bring back some new
strategies that she has been putting into place at
Belcourt.
Getting
Started
Rondeau has
come a long way since she first became interested in being
a pharmacist. While attending high school on the
reservation, she participated in a health careers class
that included opportunities to do hands-on work in the
Belcourt Indian Hospital Pharmacy. “It helped me to
physically get into the environment, meet pharmacists, and
see what the work was all about. The department chief, Mr.
Doug Demontigny, was very interested in helping students.
He let us do jobs within the pharmacy, such as prepackaging
medications and compounding. There were lots of patients.
That was a plus. I enjoyed the atmosphere and realized this
work was something I wanted to do and could do.”
After her senior year of high school, Rondeau began
attending a small college near her home, which was then
called North Dakota State University – Bottineau. That
summer, after graduating from high school, she participated
in the Native American Pharmacy Summer Program on the North
Dakota State University campus. “The program gave me an
important head start,” she said. “We stayed in dorms on
campus and had to get up bright and early for full days of
classes in anatomy, chemistry, and other subjects. “We also
got to meet some of the faculty.”
After about a year and a half at NDSU-Bottineau, Rondeau
transferred to the Turtle Mountain Community College and,
from there, to North Dakota State University-Fargo. In the
summers, during her first couple years of college, she
continued to participate in the NAPP summer programs. Then
she began doing summer externships with the Indian Health
Service. “The hands-on was really good,” she remembers.
“Not only did I earn an income, I also gained experience”.
Rondeau’s path wasn’t without problems, so she was grateful
for the support of family and friends. "My husband, Tom, is
her best friend," she exclaims. “He takes care of me. He’s
been my source of inspiration. There were some rough spots,
but he hung in there.”
Now a successful pharmacist, Rondeau is
hopeful that more Native Americans will enter her
profession. As she interviews people for her department,
she will be looking for pharmacists who are dedicated to
helping people and “not just looking for a paycheck”. She
also wants to hire pharmacists who have a positive outlook
and can handle stressful situations. Judging from all that
she has already accomplished, it seems that Rondeau has the
characteristics that she is seeking in others and that she
and her husband will continue to enhance the quality of
health care for their people.
The
article was originally published in the Autumn, 2004 issue
of
Winds of Change. (The cover
artist is Clarrisa Hudson, Tlingit.)