Talk:Respiratory therapy

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[edit] I'm

I'm Alan R, an RRT from Arizona. I've been an RT for 28 years, taught it in college for three. I'd like to have a discussion with one or more of you editors who have removed my comparisons of RC and nursing roles in today's American hospitals. When you removed my last such comment, you gave no reason.

This probably gets us back to what an encyclopedia is, and who it is meant to inform. As I understand it, encyclopedia articles are for nonspecialists. When I went to the article on RT in Encyclopedia Britannica about 1983, I learned nothing new about my field from the three paragraph article. It was written for people who knew little or nothing about RT and wanted basic information.

This is why I think it is informative to point out how nurses and therapists have roles that are closer to each other, than either one's role is to any other health caregiver.

Ok. I concede the point that it doesn't give an RT any new, helpful information to say our role is closer to the nurse's than it is to the physical therapists. But it DOES help someone who knows nothing about us understand a general notion of what we do. This similarity is the reason that an ICU nurse with a one on one assignment, for example, who hasn't been out of her patient's room for hours and can't leave the patient alone, will gladly ask a therapist, perhaps doing a vent check, to keep an eye out, while she the nurse goes to the bathroom or grabs paper work or anything else she can't do in her one on one patient's room. It's because our role resembles hers and overlaps it to, as I put it once and had it deleted, "a fair extent."

A fair extent means more than just a little, but not a large amount of resemblance, either.

For now I won't add back in what you took out, but I would like to discuss it. Other than that you just never heard it before and it sounds a little kooky? To us it is, but not to the uninformed person.

Anybody want to disagree or point out the disadvantage of making the RT-nurse comparison?

Hello Alan R. I appreciate your question about similarity of roles of nurses and therapists. From my experience (36 years) in Resp. Care, I find we are very similar in our roles. I did not read your earlier comments before they were edited out. Perhaps we could colaborate to make a statement of such, based upon a "cite-able" source. Examples may help. I start IVs, evaluate I&O, write orders for nurses and therapists to follow (protocol-based), perform ECGs, interpret rhythm strips, conduct stress tests, do discharge teaching, and the list goes on. I also do things like help move patients up in bed, get drinks of water, interview (assessment and history), and more.

Yes, our roles do overlap that of nurses. We are indeed complimentary and overlapping in roles. We could say that we have similar roles to Medical Technologists, too. I am a laboratorian in that I maintain quality controls for ABG machines, collect, analyze, and report lab values. Probably over all, I am more like a nurse than a person from Radiology or Nutritional Services, or the Engineering Dept.

Phil from Oregon Finchbook01 (talk) 08:01, 1 February 2008 (UTC)