Respiratory Therapist

I graduated high school, and then I did a biology degree at university, and then following that I went to respiratory therapy education and respiratory therapy seemed to be a growing field and it seemed very interesting. It seemed to be a place where the action always was.

That's a three-year program, so the first two years is in school, basically book work, and then the third year is a full-year clinical practicum. You can enter a program from high school; however most, majority of people would have a university background. So, Ryan tell me.

Where are we? What are we doing? We're in the ICU right now. This is Jimmy. He actually came in earlier this morning with a flare-up of his emphysema. We're going to start him on some non-invasive ventilation, to kind of help is breathing out.

Okay. Let me just get it fitted here. Okay, head forward for me. And you should notice a difference pretty quickly when it starts working, okay. There's always new equipment, new techniques, new studies coming out that you have to stay on top of. But a lot of it does come down to self-motivated learning, reading.

Some people will take further education and become a cardiovascular perfusionist or anesthesia assistant. There's also business avenues that can be explored. A lot of them are in the sale of nocturnal devices.

We have to be really good with our hands and we have to be able to troubleshoot equipment quickly. We're often called when the alarms start going off, and we run into the room and everybody's panicking and it's our job to really, really quickly figure out what's going on and reconnect that piece of equipment that became disconnected.

We do a lot of communication, obviously, in health care. Communication is key. We communicate almost continuously with other members of the multidisciplinary team, as well as patients and families. So it's important that we have those, those social skills.

We do a lot of charting, obviously, being in health care, so it's important that your, your handwriting is legible and that you write things in an organized manner. Medical mistakes happen when there's not good communication, so it's something we all try to focus on: is making sure communication is solid.