The other day I received an urgent phone call that my father was undergoing emergency surgery.  At 80 years old and in very poor health, he suffers from dementia and is very hard of hearing. I took the next flight out and spent the next 72 hours camped out at his bedside and was a ''family'' member.  Actually, as the only son, I ...

 You may find that you're not making enough money as a ''therapist'' in your particular job setting.  If you've checked the median pay scale at similar settings in your area, a setting change might be in order.  I've written a number of times about this topic for Advance, and it bears repeating again and again.  It also beats ...

In all my years of interviewing this has been my favorite question, ''why did you go into respiratory care?''  The answers have been quite interesting too say the least.  They also tell a lot about the person.  Kind of reminds me of Forrest Gump's momma talking about the shoes people wear, tells them were they have been and what ...

Throughout your practice in respiratory care, you meet many different people. It's inevitable, for better or worse, it's something we all realize from our very first patient if not sooner. As I'm sure some more experienced therapists can attest to, eventually there will be a patient that affects the way you work; someone that weighs heavy on the ...

President John F. Kennedy's statement ''Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country'' still resonates today.  It asked US citizens to look outside of themselves to fulfill your needs and help others.  There's something to that when it comes to hunting down a raise. Raise ...

Becoming the therapist I want to be often seems like a long impossible road. So I try not to focus on the road or the finish per se; I focus on the small baby steps that are taken that are so important in making me more independent and separating me from that ''new grad student'' mentality. Baby steps, like the first successful unsupervised blood ...

''Clean shirt, new shoes,   and I don't know where I'm goin' to.  Silk suit, Black tie.  I don't need a reason why...''-ZZ Top Does it really matter what we look like when we provide care to our patients as therapist?  I imagine it does not affect the level of care we provide to our patients...or does it?  Over the ...

I love presentations that compare the effectiveness of expensive MDI spacers and the good old fashioned toilet paper roll.  Not sure how well this company's do-it-yourself spacer performs, but the price is certainly attractive. Using paper and a precise system of cuts and folds, we have designed a spacer that can be produced for ...

Consider this: Why do some people get better raises than others? If you're in a structure where merit raises can be haphazard (e.g., one month it's 2 percent across the board, the next month, two people get fifty cents and another gets a dollar per hour raise), you'll need to do some close observation.  That might not be difficult when its ...

As a respiratory therapist, how secure is your job in the middle of a downturn in the nation's economy? It's probably on pretty safe ground, according to a recent report on CareerBuilder.com. Health care is currently ranked No. 4 in terms of recession-resistant jobs. In fact, 15 of the 30 fastest growing are opportunities are in health services, ...