SIERRA VISTA — Cochise College’s new Respiratory Therapy program has been granted provisional accreditation by the Commission on Accreditation for Respiratory Care.
The college is set to admit a group of 20 students into its first Respiratory Therapy class this January. After successful completion of the program, students receive an Associate of Applied Science degree and are prepared to take the National Board for Respiratory Care exam.
“Our second group of students will start in January of 2016,” said Jim Nosek, the college’s Respiratory Therapy program coordinator. “So we’re going to have one class of 20 students for two years, and I feel like that will give us a better program. It will not overrun our clinical sites since our facilities are smaller and can’t take as many students as your larger metropolitan areas.”
Provisional accreditation means the college’s Respiratory Therapy program can enroll 20 students every other year until it is granted Initial Accreditation.
“Until you have your first graduating class, you’re going to be provisional,” Nosek said. “They give us about three years to have a graduated class so they have statistics on how well students did with passing courses and the national board.”
Nosek became the program’s coordinator last October. Previously, he worked as a respiratory supervisor at Yavapai Regional Medical Center. He said although respiratory therapy is a specialized field, it offers employment in a wide range of places.
“There’s rehabilitation, neonatal specialists, hyperbaric medicine, all of these types of fields and not only hospital-based employment,” he said. “Typically the students we see have had a relative or themselves had some type of pulmonary problem, whether childhood asthma or family members who smoked and came down with complications from that. Personal experience steer them toward the respiratory field.”
In addition to hands-on experience working in facilities within and nearby Cochise County, Cochise College’s respiratory therapy students will spend a week-long intensive at Loma Linda University in Southern California for neonatal training.
“We had to think outside the box because Tucson and Phoenix hospitals couldn’t take on another school,” Nosek said. “By going to Loma Linda, upon completion of our program, students will not only receive two extra college credits, but they’ll also be qualified to sit for the neonatal-prenatal specialist test and basically considered a neonatal specialist, which is what your facilities nationwide are looking for.”
Students interested in Cochise College’s Respiratory Therapy program should complete all pre-requirement classes, preferably with a B or better, by the fall of 2015 to be considered for Spring 2016 admittance. For more information, visit www.cochise.edu/respiratory-therapy.