Enrollment Drops Despite Many Job Openings : Respiratory Therapy Class May Be Cut

Despite pleas from local hospital officials who are virtually gasping for respiratory therapists, Long Beach City College is considering suspending its training program because of declining enrollment.

LBCC administrators are considering dropping the therapist program this fall, although there are plans to reinstate it in 1989.

“There just aren’t enough students (majoring in respiratory therapy),” said Kathryn Turner, the college’s associate dean of occupational therapy. She said there are only nine students enrolled in the program.

While no one is certain why the enrollment drop has occurred at a time when therapist jobs are so abundant, experts say there are several possible explanations. Some students have a misdirected fear of contracting AIDS if they enter a health-related field. Others view the jobs as low-paying because they have traditionally been filled by women, and many women students are finding better, higher-paying jobs in non-health fields. The enrollment drop might also be related to what experts say is a general shortage of nurses.

Because each class of respiratory therapists at Long Beach City College gets its state funding based on the number of students, Turner said the college is losing “a lot of money” on the program. She said no specific figures on the program’s financial cost are available.

Administrators from several local hospitals have been organizing to counteract the college’s plans.

“(Closing the program) will be a disservice to the community by decreasing the work force in a vital field of medicine,” said Mary Ann Walker, respiratory services director at Doctors Hospital of Lakewood, reading from a letter the group sent to the college. Walker continued: “Patient care may suffer and the health of respiratory patients may be jeopardized.”

Walker said the hospital administrators will be meeting with Turner to see what can be done to save the program.

Respiratory therapists work at the direction of a doctor, carrying out tasks ranging from helping to resuscitate patients in cardiac arrest to conducting lung capacity tests on patients with asthma.

If a therapist is unavailable, the tasks have to be performed by a doctor or a registered nurse, taking time away from their duties.

Walker said she knows of 40 respiratory therapist openings at seven hospitals in the Long Beach area.

But the shortage is not confined to this region. Mike Thompson, president of the California Society of Respiratory Care, said that at least 1,000 more therapists are needed in the state. He said there are about 10,000 practitioners in California.

Nationally, the American Assn. for Respiratory Care also reports a shortage of nearly 3,000 therapists.

“One way to chart the shortage is that the number of classified ads (seeking therapists) in our association magazine has doubled in the past year,” said Sherry Milligan, the group’s assistant executive director.

LBCC is one of only six area community colleges to offer a two-year degree program for therapists. Rio Hondo, El Camino, Orange Coast, Los Angeles Valley and East Los Angeles are the others. And administrators at those schools said that while their programs are not endangered, their course enrollment is waning as well.

Michelle Boyer, program director at Rio Hondo College near Whittier, said that in the mid-1970s the respiratory therapy program at her college had 60 applications a year. But she said this year’s class has only 12 students.

Thompson, a teacher at East Los Angeles College, said he believes the shortage has occurred partly because more women are finding opportunities in non-health fields, and partly because many students fear that medical work might expose them to AIDS.

“Traditionally female jobs are not as desirable as traditionally male jobs, which pay more,” Thompson said. Others are wrongly afraid that working with AIDS patients, who often have chronic respiratory problems, is dangerous, he said.

“People think you can get AIDS just by being in the same room with someone (who is infected),” Thompson said.

Private Schooling Costly

A private school in Long Beach, California Paramedical and Technical College, offers a one-year, non-degree program for therapists at a cost of more than $4,000. The charge to the student at a community college is $50 a semester plus books.

“But our students get to go out and get a job after a year and make $20,000, so they are ahead in the long run,” said Barbara Carter, the private school’s program director.

Carter declined to say how many students are enrolled in her program, but state figures show that the private school has about five times as many students taking the state proficiency test as LBCC.

Some administrators criticized the graduates of one-year programs as being not as well trained as their community college counterparts.

Leonard Carreathers, a respiratory supervisor at Pioneer Hospital in Artesia, said he attended a technical school during the 1970s, but later went through a community college program “because I felt stupid” next to the two-year graduates.

“I knew 10% of what a community college graduate did,” Carreathers said.

Statewide, 44% of all students who took the state proficiency test between January, 1985, and July, 1987, passed, a spokesman from the state licensing board said.

LBCC’s graduates had a 53% pass rate, those statistics showed, while California Paramedical and Technical’s rate was 24.6%.

A spokesman for the National Board for Respiratory Care, which developed the test used by California, said about 80% of community college graduates and 50% of technical school graduates pass the test on the first try. He said very few of those repeating the test pass, causing the overall figures to drop.

The competition among hospitals for what few available therapists there are in the Long Beach area is intensifying. Those already employed are facing an increasing workload.

The shortage has caused a rapid escalation in wages for therapists, with some hospitals offering a starting salary of $15 an hour, up from $10 only a few years ago, administrators said.

“But (a therapist’s) productivity had better reflect that increase,” said Russell Aldrin, the coordinator of respiratory services at two local hospitals.

Memorial Medical Center of Long Beach is offering a $1,500 finder’s fee to employees who recruit a therapist. Those already on staff are sometimes required to work 60 hours a week, according to Dave Calder, the department’s director.

“It’s very scary when you are working people (that hard),” Calder said. He said that the number of complaints against therapists by doctors and nurses has risen as the workload has increased.

Richard Helgemo, administrator of the respiratory therapy department at Kaiser Permanente Hospital in Bellflower, said he has had a stable staff of therapists for several years. But Helgemo said other hospitals in the Kaiser system are suffering.

Things are not much better at smaller hospitals. Walker said Doctors Hospital has had one opening unfilled for 10 months.

Temporary-job agencies that specialize in respiratory therapists are reporting record business. Hospitals use agencies when they need short-term employees, but hospital administrators say the practice drives up health costs because the agencies charge fees for placing workers.

Alice Dowell, owner of Consolidated Health Services of Long Beach, said she could use 60 more therapists to augment her current staff of 129.

Dowell said it used to be that agencies such as hers would employ people who did not want to work nights and weekends as hospitals require. Those therapists were paid less and had no benefits.

But now, because of the competition, the agencies offer benefits as well as wages that are often higher than a hospital’s, Dowell said.

“There is no reason anymore for a therapist to work (directly for) a hospital,” Dowell said.

But hospital administrators, while acknowledging that they have to depend more and more on these agencies, fear that this will lead to a drop in the quality of care.

“There is no control over the quality of the person and they often aren’t used to (a hospital’s) own particular facilities,” Walker said.

Dowell disagreed.

“I think (a registry therapist) in most instances is more flexible when it comes to handling crises than somebody who is just working in one hospital,” Dowell said, because they have been exposed to the procedures of several institutions.