I read this article today and I liked it. When I was a respiratory student someone once tried to discourage me from becoming an RT.

http://scrubsmag.com/would-you-ever-discourage-someone-from-becoming-a-nurse/

Now some of the people who know that I am now an RN as well as an RRT, discourage me from working in a certain unit or hospital but most have been very supportive to me, which I appreciate a lot.

I can’t really say if I would discourage anyone from becoming a nurse because I have no experience to speak of. I see nursing from a respiratory therapy perspective and it is not always a positive view. That is not to say it is always a negative view. It is usually isolated cases. With that said, would I encourage people to not be an RT? Maybe. The reality of the matter is:

1. Shit does roll down hill. I’ve been burned by docs and nurses alike because of something they told me to do and then denied it. If someone is going under the bus, in my experience, it’s usually the RT. Just sayin.

2. Depending on where you work and what type of doctors you have (community doctors, vs intensivests and hospitalists) RT’s can have a lot or no autonomy at all. Many facilities have protocols (like in nursing) that give specific guidelines as to how to
Proceed with your care. Criteria for unnecessary treatments to be discontinued. On the other hand there are many that have no protocols and there is a lot of unnecessary stuff that gets ordered and done and should be discontinued. Sadly, In facilities where there are no protocols we need orders for EVERYTHING we do.

3. In some places RT’s get little respect for their profession. It is not uncommon for others in the hospital to think that the RT’s are sitting in the department just waiting for a call from
A nurse or whoever. That is not true at all. I have been told more than once that a nursing degree is more important than a respiratory degree whether they are a BS Or an AS degree. Our degree is just as important and we are specialists. That doesn’t equal inferior.

In addition, there have been numerous times that a nurse will Just step in right while I working with the patient to either talk to them Or give them meds when I trying to treat them. Bad manners? Maybe or just a feeling of superiority.

4. We often have to be in more than one place at one time. Someone needs a stat treatment, someone else needs to be extubated, someone needs oxygen, they need you for a conscious sedation or a cardioversion, someone needs assessing etc- usually all at the same time. You must be able to multitask or prioritize however, your priority may not be someone else’s priority do frequently the other persons priority wins.

4. We do get downtime depending on where you are covering any given day. However, frequently we do not get downtime due to high patient acuity and trends in patient influx. Especially in the winter where lung disease and flu season is high.

5. We save lives each day. RT is called when someone cannot breathe, or when someone is coding. We provide the airway.

5. Our time is valuable. For example, once it was requested that I bring a tank key for a home care patient was was being discharged. I happen to be covering the ICU with sick patients. So I run around for 15 min looking for a tank key (our tanks do not need keys) and I get up to the floor and the patient is gone. She didn’t even have the courtesy to call me back to let me know she didn’t need it anymore. I don’t want to be that nurse who thinks the no one else’s time is valuable. I refuse to be that nurse.

So I would not discourage someone from becoming RT. I’m just a bit tired of how RT’s are treated on a day to day basis. Somedays are good and some are terrible. I don’t enjoy the terrible days. This is not to say that it is this way at every hospital because it certainly is not.