Transcription:
What is Respiratory Therapy and Who It Benefits

Melanie Cole (Host): Everyone’s heard of a physical therapist. You all know what they do. If you’ve been injured, you go see one, but what is a respiratory therapist and what do they do? My guest today is Glenda Spaulding, she’s a registered respiratory therapist at Hendricks Regional Health. Glenda, let’s just start right off, what is a respiratory therapist?

Glenda Spaulding (Guest): Yes, essentially a respiratory therapist is a degreed professional who has an extensive knowledge base of the cardiopulmonary system. We work very closely with other members of our medical treatment team, which includes our doctors, our nurses, in order to help prevent, identify, and treat respiratory disorders and diseases.

Host: Tell us what your training is like.

Glenda: Well the training starts off at the academic college level. You go through the – you either have an Associates or Bachelor’s degree in general, and most academic institutions, they have programs where you can go ahead and get accepted and go through the program in order to become registered.

Host: So tell us what kinds of people that you help.

Glenda: Yeah so respiratory therapist involves all patient populations. We start with our premature infants and we work all the way up to the geriatric population, and within that spectrum, we deal with prematurity and lung conditions that go along with that. We also deal with asthmatic patients, COPD, chronic lung patients, anybody really who has anything, any disorder of the lung, we are usually involved in the care and education and treatment of those patients.

Host: Glenda, as people know, if they go to physical therapy, they can help strengthen whichever joints and ligaments have been damaged. Aside from the babies that you work with, can lung damage from COPD or emphysema, can that be reversed with respiratory therapy?

Glenda: No, COPD, emphysema cannot be reversed. That is something that we do a lot of education with our patients to help them live very active, daily lives, but that is not something that can be reversed, but we do have a lot of medication and a lot of rehabilitation that will allow these patients to perform their normal activities of daily living.

Host: Tell us about some of those. What are treatments like with you? What kinds of treatments do you administer?

Glenda: Well if we have a COPD patient, they usually are on medications, which are bronchodilators, which help open up those airways in the lung. They also have maintenance medication, which help prevent airway inflammation that is quite frequently seen with our COPD patients. We also have pulmonary rehabilitation that will allow the patient to help build up their strength and go ahead and function much easier when they’re in the home environment.

Host: So what are those treatments then like for patients, and when you mention the home environment, what do you ask patients to do on their own to help the therapy that you’re doing with them?

Glenda: Well when we educate our patients on their lung condition, in this case COPD, we provide them with a sheet that has a – every morning we encourage them to write what they’re feeling. How are they coughing? Is there anything coming up? How do they feel when they’re walking? How short of breath do they get when they’re in the sitting position or if they’re mobile? And we provide that zone sheet, and that gives them a range of what they need to do. If they’re doing well, they continue on with their day based upon their numbers. If they’re not feeling so well and their numbers are not looking so good, we encourage them to call their physician, and when they call their physician they will guide them further, whether they need to come to the emergency department or a more invasive care, or whether they can just go into their doctor’s office.

Host: It’s an interesting field that you’re in Glenda, and you can help so many people. What do you feel, in your opinion, are some of the challenges working with patients that have acquired lung damage?

Glenda: I think a lot of what we encounter in our profession is finding a way to continue our education. The patients always benefit from education. There’s never enough education. So whenever we see a patient, we’re always providing them, reeducating them on their lung condition, and different things that they can do. That would be the most difficult part of what we’re trying to do and allowing our patients to lead a very active life. So education is very, very, very important in what we’re doing.

Host: Well education is so important in so many healthcare fields. Is lung damage always from smoking? Because obviously we haven’t mentioned that yet today, but it would seem to be one of the major causes of lung damage. Is that always the case?

Glenda: Smoking is definitely one of the highest ranking reasons for lung damage, but you also have other professions, whether you work in steel mills, work with asbestos, you work with poultry farming – you can get lung disease from a lot of different things. Second hand smoke is a big issue, we do see a lot also, but smoking is number one.

Host: What do you tell people about that and ways to quit because it’s such an important part of therapy is to try and quit, which is not easy for so many people. What does that education look like and what support services are available to help them quit?

Glenda: We have – there are a lot of educators who are specific in smoking cessation. We want to educate the patient about the dangers of smoking. A lot of the population probably is the elderly population, so that information really wasn’t available to them when they were much younger, and now that they’re seeing the damage has occurred, we want to get them off. We want to help them stop smoking. So we provide education in the form of discussion, in the form of educators, and we really want them to know what’s going on in their body and they have – there’s just so much information available to them and we try to provide everything we can.

Host: Well I’m sure you do and you know it’s something that people do need to be educated about, and it’s not always easy to hear that kind of information. Glenda, what are some of the emerging therapies in the field? Is there some new and exciting things that you’re doing with people? You know, we’ve seen people breathe into that spirometer and practice their breathing. What else is it like and what’s going on in the field?

Glenda: Yes, we’re always making great advancements with our patients and our equipment and the things we can do. We have a lot of evidence based studies that we function off of. We have our medical doctors who are highly skilled and really provide a lot of guidance in how we proceed with each patient as an individual because each patient, although they may have for COPD for instance, they’re all individuals and experience different things. So some medications work for some people and some do not work as well for another patient, so we really are empowered by our physicians and how progressive we’ve become in the medical field.

Host: Isn’t that wonderful. What a great field that you’re in. Glenda, wrap it up for us with your best advice about respiratory therapy, about your field, and what you can do for patients with lung damage at Hendricks Regional Health.

Glenda: Well it’s a wonderful field to be in. I think if anybody needs any kind of respiratory care, it doesn’t have to be COPD, anything to do with the respiratory system, we really encourage you to see your family physician or your emergency room if you’re in emergent status, and we can really guide you from there and get you the help you need. And for anyone who is interested in becoming a respiratory therapist, we really encourage you to look at your colleges or universities, most of them have a respiratory program that we would love to bring new people into. It’s very rewarding.

Host: Thank you Glenda for joining us today and explaining your field and the many patient populations that you can help. Thank you again. This is Health Talks with HRH, Hendricks Regional Health. For more information, please visit Hendricks.org, that’s Hendricks.org. This is Melanie Cole, thanks for tuning in.