Are online didactic schools good for our profession?

[armymommax2]

As a fellow RT, and one who will be joining you at UND! CUDOS!!! Honestly the one thing an RT and a PA have in common is how underestimated and misunderstood each profession is among other healthcare professions. I have met so many new PA grads who come out of school with NO prior HCE except what they obtained in PA training. As I have stated in prior posts to this tread...I do not need interaction in a classroom...and "Blackboard" is live time....so it's not like the online student is not participating together.

 

I look forward to meeting you in May!

 

 

Online programs are the way of the future. How do you think NPs are trained? Off the top of my head I know of 4 universities in my area that do online FNP, ANP, etc. Your crazy to think that online educaiton is not the way of the future. The NP programs around my area have limited time spent at the university and most are classes they take are the same ones I took for my masters and then they do a few hundred hours of rotations. That I think is not the best way to have good clincial knowledge. Students at UND spend 15 weeks at the university doing things that I listed above and think that this is a great way to allow health care professionals to continue working part time and still be able to go to school (for the first 6-8 months). So I would agree with you if we rarely went to the university and had limited interactions with the professors, but I can say with my masters in health science from saint francis university (all online) I learned a lot from those classes because I wanted to learned and actually read/did what I was suppose to do. It does not matter on campus or online ,it is what YOU want to put into it and get out of it. Same way in undergrad. I skipped classes a lot because I was doing research or working, but still did very well and learned a lot from the classes. I do not know much about a assistant in radiology, but I do know that your patient care interactions are in no way similiar to mine. If you did what I do for a career, you would understand where I am coming from. Histories, screening patients, IVs, paperwork, thats all good, but try educating patients, families, freinds about asthma (children and adults)/copd/pneumonia/smoking cessation/life style changes. Telling people that they need to quit doing this or they will die is not just something tech, PCAs do. Helping them understand their disease process or edcuating them on why they should quit. Try telling patients that they have pneumonia or asthma and how I am hear to help them by other interventions (therapy/education) via a physician-therapist driven protocol (so I do not have to talk with a doc., pa, np to do what I need to do). As an asthma educator and a respiratory disease management assessor, the physicians put their order in as RT assess and treat. That opens a HUGE door into what I can do to help this patient get better. Try telling a family member that their kid(s) are in critical condition and are not breathing or their heart is not pumping (keeping them alive via pressors etc.). I have had to do all of this many times while in the ER. Not just the docs tell people bad news, other allied health professsionals do also. You will never understand the difference between techs, CNA,MA,LPN, and RN, RTs, SLP, Rad. Therp., AT, Chiro, etc. because you have never been in our shoes. You think your assistant experience had great interactions with patients, but try actively coding one's family member and have them standing near you or touching you while you are in a middle of a code. I have had that more times than not and it is very uncomfortable, but it is the families wishes to be there when the patient is dying. As an RRT I have sat through a 100 + surgeries (cath. lab, IR, open bellies, emergent CABG, AAA, etc because they patient was on ventilation that anesth. (MDs, DOs, CRNAs) where not trained on and could not run the ventilators. (APRV (drager) Bi-vent (servo i) bi-level (PB 840) duopap (hamilton g-5) and VDR). The aprv, bivent, duopap, bilevel are 99% the same inverse ratio ventilation with minor differences and the VDR is a whole new type of ventilation most people dont even know about. So, yes we do a lot more than the typical pre-PA (tech, cna, emt etc) and we are PROUD of our past HCE and the schools are also because we believe we have a leg up on other schools/students because we are well versed in the health care system. I dont see your downfall to online education because again it is WHAT YOU bring to the table and not that you sit through a lecture playing on your iphone or ipad.

P.S. the more HCE hours one has the more prepared they are for PA school. Thats why the more the better and why PA schools want you to have TONS of hours as a PA student because you will see new things everyday and learn more about the health care system as a whole and not just a speciality.