Article Critique The Respiratory Therapy Profession Is at a Crossroads

Article Critique
Name
Institution
The article "The Respiratory Therapy Profession Is at a Crossroads" by Robert M Kacmarek and Brian K Walsh seeks to address one of the nine recommendations that were made by a task force commissioned by the American Association for Respiratory Care (AARC). This recommendation required that all respiratory therapy educational programs awarded a baccalaureate or a higher degree to all the graduates. The authors outline why this recommendation was rejected and discuss why the implementation of this recommendation is critically essential for the respiratory care profession. I believe that this article has addressed this issue thoroughly and has also outlined a recommendation which should be considered. It is important to note that in this era the respiratory therapists need more time to learn the advanced technologies we work with today fully. The industry-wide shift to baccalaureate degrees is an effort to ensure that the workforce is adequately prepared to meet the challenges it will face in terms of protocol-driven care and disaster management.
The American Association for Respiratory Care after three years of deliberations and discussions with different stakeholders in the respiratory care agreed that it was necessary to make changes in the in the respiratory therapy profession. These plans were set to start from 2015 and beyond and they were intended to facilitate continued success. The association suggested that individuals undertaking respiratory therapy programs should be awarded baccalaureate or higher degrees by the year 2020 (Kacmarek & Walsh, 2017). However, this suggestion was rejected in 2012 by the AARC Board of Directors who claimed that the baccalaureate programs were insufficient. The authors maintain that the process of increasing graduate degrees has been slow but it is estimated that about eighty percent of respiratory therapists will have a baccalaureate degree by the end of 2019. The authors have noted that the policies of the Commission on Accreditation for Respiratory Care (CoARC) have been revised to allow all the respiratory care programs to provide the graduates with baccalaureate and or graduate degree. However, the authors are concerned about the pace of implementing these changes despite the encouragement and commitment by CoARC.
Most importantly the authors have examined the collaborative effort between the AARC Board of Directors, Coalition for Baccalaureate, CoARC and the Graduate Respiratory Therapy Education as the main driving forces behind the conversion of associate degree programs to the baccalaureate level (Kacmarek & Walsh, 2017). All these stakeholders have aided in selecting the programs which are easy to convert. Besides, the authors have explained that the respiratory care profession also faces the risk of losing its specialists to other fields in the healthcare because of several factors which include limited professional growth, inadequate human resources in the healthcare institutions and respiratory care professionals also have a narrow scope of clinical practice (Kacmarek & Walsh, 2017). Other issues identified in this article that directly affect the respiratory care practitioners are low salaries, lack of harmony. Kaczmarek and Walsh have recommended that specific dates should be set aside to mandate changes and they have also emphasized that without putting pressure on the learning institutions, then the process of changing the curriculums will very slow since the change which has happened in the last six years is very minimal.
This article is informative as it brings insights into the critical issues affecting the respiratory therapy profession and specializes in this field and also outlines the achievements which have been made in establishing baccalaureate and graduate degrees in respiratory therapy programs. Additionally, the authors have also recommended ways through which the stakeholders may ensure that these changes are realized at a faster rate than it has been in the past (Kacmarek & Walsh, 2017). The information and data provided by the authors is accurate as it is based on accurate data from credible sources such as the reports by the American Association for Respiratory Care, Commission on Accreditation for Respiratory Care and from research studies, for example, the study regarding the future of respiratory care carried out by Stephen G. Smi...