Student Job Description
Respiratory Care Students must demonstrate numerous competencies representing all three learning domains: the cognitive, psychomotor and affective domains. Students learn, practice, and verify these competencies in a number of settings including the classroom, laboratory and clinic.
To achieve the required competencies in the classroom setting, respiratory care students must perceive, assimilate and integrate information from a variety of sources. These sources include oral instruction, printed material, visual media, and live demonstrations. Student must participate in classroom discussions, give oral reports, and pass written and computer-based examinations of various formats. Completion of these tasks requires cognitive skills, such as reading, writing and problem-solving. To be physically capable of the classroom work, student must, with assistance, be able to: hear, see, speak, sit, and touch.
Respiratory care laboratories provide students with the opportunity to view demonstrations, evaluate and practice with medical devices and perform simulated clinical procedures. In addition to the cognitive skills required in the classroom, students, must demonstrate psychomotor skills in manipulating patients and equipment, as well as general professional behaviors, like team-building and interpersonal communications. To satisfy laboratory requirements, students must perform all procedures without critical error. This requires high levels of cognitive, perceptual, and psychomotor function. In addition to the physical capabilities for classroom work, the laboratories require students, with assistance to: assemble equipment, stand while using both hands to perform procedures, perform fine motor skills, and perform procedures requiring considerable strength. Examples of the latter procedures include: turning and moving patients, endotracheal intubation and cardiopulmonary resuscitation.
Clinical education in respiratory care involves application of skills acquired in the classroom and laboratory settings to actual patients in the clinical setting. In addition to the cognitive skills required in those settings, students must demonstrate skills in patient assessment, clinical reasoning, problem-solving, synthesizing care plans, and troubleshooting equipment. Professional behaviors required for clinical training include constructive responses to situations involving emergencies, deaths, stress, frustrating situations and complex interactions with other members of the health care team. Students must also demonstrate respect for other, empathy, responsibility, efficiency, integrity, and initiative. In addition to the physical capabilities required during the classroom and laboratory sessions, clinical training includes moving briskly between patient care areas and meeting the mental and physical demands of twelve-hour shifts, on both day and night rotations.
Accreditation
The Respiratory Care Program at UTMB was transferred
from the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston in 1993. The
program received an initial letter of review from the Accrediting Agency in
1994. Following two years of outcomes data collection, the program received
initial accreditation in 1996 for a five year period.
In November of 2000 the Committee on Accreditation for
Respiratory Care (CoARC) implemented a new review system based on evaluation
of Yearly Outcomes against a set of CoARC Thresholds. The UTMB program’s
annual report was reviewed and rated as “meeting or exceeding all of the
current CoARC Outcomes Thresholds”.
In January of 2007 the department received notification
from the Commission on Accreditation of Allied Health Education Programs (CAAHEP)
that the commission voted to award continuing accreditation for the Advanced
Level Respiratory Therapy Program at UTMB-Galveston. This vote was based on
the Committee on Accreditation for Respiratory Care's (CoARC) peer review
on-site visit and its subsequent recommendations that the program was found
to be in full compliance. The next scheduled comprehensive evaluation of the
program is scheduled to occur no later than 2015.
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