Post 1 Discuss this. Tell a story if you are comfortable. Were you unhappy with

Post 1
Discuss this. Tell a story if you are comfortable. Were you unhappy with the care that was being given or withheld? How did you handle it? Is there something that your facility offers in this regard? Are you comfortable asking for support? Other than daily shift rounds, have you ever been asked to sit in on the discussion of a critical patient’s care? Are there any RCPs on your hospital’s ethics committee? 
The story I want to discuss is regarding the ethical dilemma of health care providers in public health emergencies or disasters. Back in March 2020, when the COVID pandemic began, there were growing fears that the United States could face a shortage of ventilators for coronavirus patients. The hospital I work in had almost half of the hospital patients were COVID-related. Initially, we allocated equipment such as ventilators and high flow on a first-come, first-served basis. At one point, we were almost running out of all high flows and had to wait to get the supply from other regions. Now the ethical dilemma is that two patients have equal needs for equipment. What should we do? We were feeling so powerless where we were like the front-line soldiers but did not have enough supplies and equipment to save our people right away. Also, since we were new to this situation, there was no proper planning or workflow regarding allocating resources. We were somehow managing without any specific directions. There were many instances where we could not provide the necessary equipment to the most needed people. We required the triaging approach in allocating the available resources. We were very unhappy with the care patients could not get due to lack of resources.
Later as a department, we all came together and voiced our concern to the upper management. Finally, we were able to get the equipment from other regions. This situation taught us the need for proper planning or setting up some algorithm or protocol that can help when these kinds of unpredictable situations arise. Almost going into two years of the pandemic, we finally created a workflow to guide us to deal with this kind of situation in future.
Yes, I have been a part of a critical patient’s care discussion, but we don’t have any RCP in our hospital’s ethics committee.
References
Jad, A., & Krulwich, R. (2016, August 21). Playing God. Radiolab WNYC. https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/playing-god (Links to an external site.)
Perretta, J. S. (2014). Ethics in perinatal and pediatric respiratory care. In Neonatal and pediatric
respiratory care. F. A. Davis Company.
Post 2
Professional competency is something that rings true to me as a respiratory therapist. Maintaining ongoing continuing education is something that I value as we not only can stay up to date on practices but also broaden our knowledge on what works best for our patients. Meeting the required CEU’s to renew our license can be at times annoying but I think it is for the best. Medical technology is something that is constantly evolving and it is up to us to stay up to date in our respective practices. In my opinion our medical system does well with this concept as they require us to meet certain CEU’s per license renewal or risk not being able to renew our license. This not only allows us to broaden our knowledge but also allows us to learn new things that we missed out on before. In addition to maintaining our CEU’s at some hospitals they implement training programs where we can refine our clinical practices so we can apply our new experiences towards our future patients. For example running mock codes is something that I value as we don’t run into these situations everyday and it is good practice. Clinicians also have a duty to notify supervisors when there are concerns about the professional competency of peers (Perretta, 2014). By providing more training programs where healthcare workers are exposed to scenarios that they don’t see everyday this can provide a safer work environment if it were to happen in a real-life situation. 
References:
Perretta, J. S. (2014). Neonatal and pediatric respiratory care: A patient case method. F.A. Davis Company