A 1st-level character starts with about 100 gp (varies by class), and is supposed to have around 1,000 gp by 2nd level. A wand of cure light wounds is worth 750 gp, and you can tally it as split between the players when determining what loot to drop. You can easily drop (or reward) this early on without imbalancing anything. From then on the ranger can use the wand without a check as cure light wounds is a ranger spell, and all you need to use a wand is to have the spell on your list.
Ultimately, though, it probably won’t make a great deal of difference at level 1. Characters at 1st level just don’t have enough HP; they tend to be either alive or dying. Still, the wand will prove useful for a long time; it is just about the most cost-efficient form of healing in the game.
The ranger, of course, will likely not want to use the wand in combat – and he’s right. The healing spells (aside from heal and mass heal) offer extremely low numbers, making them very inefficient, and this inefficiency increases with higher level spells (again, until heal). Thus healing is ideally taking place only after combat, at which point it’s no skin off your ranger’s teeth to pop a few charges of the wand. In an emergency, of course, even the tiny amount of healing that cure light wounds offers can save someone from bleeding to death.
Overall, 3.x has little notion of or requirement of having various “roles” in the party. A dedicated healer is completely unnecessary (and often wasteful; because of the inefficiencies of healing, a character is better off just preventing damage in the first place, whether that be through simply killing enemies first or by using buffs and battlefield control). So I wouldn’t worry too much about it, aside from the basic wand so the players aren’t recuperating for a week after every fight.