A ‘Different’ Kind of RT Work

I see many posts in the various forums from RT’s looking for something different… something besides 12 hour shifts. Oh, what to do, what to do that won’t tax our bodies any worse than what we have going on now. Fellow RT’s, use your BRAINPOWER!! What I mean is, you all know A LOT. And you can (and should) put that knowledge to use. Here’s what happened to me:

In a nutshell, I found a void, and I filled it. 2 deep voids, actually. I noticed that new hire and specialty ICU orientations are getting shorter and shorter and in my opinion, that was not OK. I noticed people vacating positions, and new people filling those positions had almost nothing to go on. Starting from scratch. All because HR wouldn’t allow for any overlap of the retiring and the incoming employees. (What does HR know about RT, anyway? 🙂 )

Specifically, I worked at many hospitals that were not really set up for kids, but often got pediatric patients in the ED or the PACU. I worked at a few hospitals that were community hospitals. This includes babies and children. But the RT staff (and nursing) was all adult therapists, since there was no NICU nor PICU. And I worked at 2 hospitals with a pediatric floor area that quickly turned into a holding area until the local children’s hospital transport team could come and get them. After they crashed.

A hospital can call itself what it wants, but the community doesn’t really see anything besides the word “EMERGENCY” when they need it.

And please, don’t get me started on surgeons that operate on kids but didn’t ask if anyone knows how to take care of a crashing post- op kid. Or pediatricians that only know how to take care of minor illnesses on a Peds floor.

Does any of this ring true for you? Are there any other situations you can think of, where education is desperately needed but just isn’t happening?

That’s where you come in….. yes, YOU. You don’t have to be an Educator, Supervisor, or anything with a lot of letters after your name to qualify to write courses. If you can do a brain dump, then back it up with recent evidence, and present it in an organized fashion, you are ready.

So far, for me this method has produced 2 -five hour workshops and several online courses. How did I do that? Stay tuned, in part 2 I’ll outline exactly what I did. Interested?