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Department Showcase - January |
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Current and past managers celebrate 10 years of Pulmonary Rehab at Great Plains Regional Medical Center.
The NSRC is proud to provide a monthly Respiratory Showcase that will put a spotlight on a Respiratory Department near you. Departments will be picked randomly throughout Nebraska showing the diversity amongst departments and the support of respiratory care statewide.
This month’s Respiratory Showcase is the Pulmonary Services Department of Great Plains Regional Medical Center in North Platte.
Shelley Martinez, the Pulmonary Services Department Director, describes “A Day in the Life” of a respiratory therapist in their department below. The department consists of 12-Respiratory staff, 3 Pulmonary Rehab staff, and 2-Sleep Lab staff.
We have well rounded educated and diverse respiratory therapists. We provide 24/7 hospital coverage with a minimum of two staff all the time. Every day is a different day for respiratory therapists. There is no specialization; everyone is expected to be able to do everything. We see patients of all ages. Our nursery keeps several newborns thirty weeks and older. We see quite a few sets of twins. We respond to codes, traumas, rapid response calls and stat c-sections. Being close to the interstate provides us with our share of traumas as well as farming/ranching accidents. We provide pre and post surgical care. We see outpatients for pulmonary function testing and other respiratory needs. We have a 10 bed ICU where we average 3 to 4 ventilators at a time. We use our BIPAP’s often throughout the hospital. We provide EKG coverage and often help other departments out. Within the last year GPRMC has employed 2 Neurologists. The sleep lab plans to be working with them more closely to perform more specific testing for them.
Pulmonary Rehab is busy 5 days a week. We start new clients on Tuesday and Thursday and teach one-to-one for 5 sessions and then move them over to Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Most of the clients continue on into the maintenance program. Pulmonary Rehab just had their 10-year anniversary of being open. We held a celebration for all the clients. We currently have over 100 clients that attend our maintenance program. Past directors came to help us celebrate and we had a live radio broadcast with interviews with the staff to talk about the program, COPD and smoking.
To sum it up, we do a little bit of everything but not a whole lot of just one thing. Disclaimer:
The information and pictures in the Respiratory Showcase are provided
with the permission of the submitting hospital.
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