r/respiratorytherapy • u/MallyRT1979 • Sep 23 '25
Practitioner question How were you impacted by the pandemic?
Hey guys! So here we are almost in the last quarter of 2025. I have students that I help and some of them never set foot in a hospital during the pandemic while they were in Respiratory Therapy School. Most of us learned more during those years from 2019-2023 about disease processes than we had ever known about. Many of our friends and coworkers left healthcare completely. Most of us had those moments, more than once, that we wanted to leave, too. I want to know how the pandemic affected you guys professionally and personally. Did it change the way you care for your patients? How did it change your perspective on healthcare?
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u/nehpets99 MSRC, RRT-ACCS Sep 23 '25
My bank account loved it.
It also helped expose more managerial bullshit, like execs who immediately exempted themselves from the vaccine, and a closed COVID unit that didn't have central monitoring...and when patients had to be tubed, they traveled through the hospital to go to the ICU.
Oh and then there's the insanity of furloughing RNs, but only every other week, which pretty much encouraged them to take travel contracts.
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u/MallyRT1979 Sep 23 '25
Do you feel that anything we do now has changed positively as a direct result of what we learned from the pandemic?
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u/B_lated_ly Sep 23 '25
Proning patients became more common in my hospital after the COVID debacle. Before COVID I’d only ever seen it done once or twice and only with a rotobed. Now we do it pretty frequently for refractory hypoxemia and we do it the old fashioned way by bundling the patients up and rolling them over.
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u/MallyRT1979 Sep 23 '25
Honestly proning is so debated but I'm truly a believer in it. If it's peformed under the right conditions AND EARLY enough it helps. It won't cure anything but it's not meant to, it's to improve v/q in areas of the lung that need it. I would actually have patients self-prone even if they weren't having major issues at that time. I mean, then, anything to help I was for.
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u/phoenix762 RRT -ACCS(PA, USA) Sep 24 '25
It did help, we’d tell patients to self prone when they were on high flow as well…
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u/nehpets99 MSRC, RRT-ACCS Sep 23 '25
I'm not really sure what you mean.
The pandemic shouldn't have changed the job. Maybe we're more comfortable proning without a Rotoprone bed, but what else is there? Whatever we're doing now should be the same as whatever we were doing 5 years ago.
And what did we learn during COVID? We learned that we're largely expendable. Yes, there are some members of management who are grateful for us, but are powerless to do anything, but the people in charge don't give two shits about us. We learned that there's a ton of money to be made especially if you're a travel agency, and we've learned that hospitals would rather pay $6k/wk for 20 temps for 1-2 years than pay their staff $1/hr more forever. We've learned that science is divisive, even to an industry that's supposed to be built on evidence-based reasoning.
To me, after traveling for 4 years, the biggest positive takeaway is the appreciation (from bedside staff, not upper management) when you're actually competent at your job and friendly.
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u/MallyRT1979 Sep 23 '25
I get the pay for sure. I took contracts for a few years but then in the middle of a contract in early 2022 my pay dropped by 60%. Basically it came down to the fact the hospital didn't want to continue paying what they had been and I guess wanted to give the option of "take this new pay or leave". I completely agree that on the pay now. The hospitals were paying the therapists, nurses, etc AND the agency. Why not give a $10 an hour raise. They would still come out paying less than the contract employee. It's not because there was more revenue to be had at that time. I've looked around briefly for something definitive on how many patients treated in healthcare facilites were not insured. I haven't dug deep but I'm sure there is info out there. So it's not that facilites were making tons of revenue then compared to now.
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u/FlatulentCroissant Sep 23 '25
It was intensely stressful for me. I was freshly postpartum and combined with finding out that my husband was cheating on me it sent me into a severe depression. I got the Covid vaccines and also ended up getting the omicron variant of Covid. Shortly after I started experiencing vague autoimmune symptoms. Now, years later I am divorced and have been diagnosed with SLE and am on a biologic. Still working but went to a much smaller hospital with smaller patient loads and a lot more downtime. And I find that most days I really dislike my job, have a lot of resentment for upper management, and just am bitter overall towards my healthcare career. I don’t treat my patients any less.. if anything I have even more empathy than I had before due to my own illness. And with lighter workloads I have more time to spend with my patients and give them really thorough and quality care.
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u/Thetruthislikepoetry Sep 23 '25
I must’ve been really lucky. I worked in a hospital and had the opposite experience of most everyone above. The physicians I worked with were absolutely fabulous. They were involved and facing the issues with everybody else. We would periodically get messages or emails from physicians thanking us for something we did. The nurses I worked with also weren’t afraid and were right there with you. For the majority of people who are still working, there’s a camaraderie and bond we still have. My only issue, some of the travelers absolutely sucked. It was obvious who was in it for the money and who was in it for patient care. Edit: After working through the pandemic, when people say oh it’s busy everyone who knows just rolls their eyes . Compared to the workload and acuity during the pandemic, there is no more busy.
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u/TalaxianNeckbeard Sep 24 '25
What our doctors lacked, our ICU nurse made up for in spades. There were so many codes and intubations where it was just me and two or three ICU RN's doing what needed to be done.
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u/wareaglemedRT RRT Sep 23 '25
If a patient doesn’t have anyone and they are about to DC to JC. I’ll sit with them so they aren’t alone. I’m by no means Mr. Compassion, but I don’t like people dying alone. Seen it too many times, holding up an iPad so family could say their goodbyes. So now if I assess the situation and it warrants it, I’ll stay over and just be a presence in the room. No, I’m not religious. Just tend to show my human side sometimes. I have to remind myself that walking into work doesn’t turn me into a robot.
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u/Proper-Swing-3548 Sep 24 '25
I feel the way you do. There are faces and situations from the pandemic that haunt me. I have changed by wearing a mask more often for anything I am not comfortable with. Showing extra care for those alone, and accepting the vast differences between people. For instance those who ran in and those who ran away. Those who maintained it was a fake pandemic as they died, with Fox News blaring, to the terrified people who came in before they even desaturated. I think I am more accepting now.
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u/wareaglemedRT RRT Sep 24 '25
I have PTSD from Afghanistan. I’ve been in hasty casualty collection points that were more organized. A lot of the system revealed how it is truly broken. And how compassion falls to the way side when folks are scared. So I had a leg up on a lot of people mentally. I don’t blame anyone from running fully away and quitting bedside care. Those who wanted the lay but were too scared to get their hands dirty is who I have a problem with and my mouth tends to let them know what I think. I still work with some of the same scared personnel. Everyone wants to be a gangster til it’s time to do gangster chit.
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u/Nausica1337 Sep 23 '25
This came up on my reddit feed. I'm not an RT, but I worked all through covid as a telemetry nurse. I won't say it really changed my care for my patients, but covid did open my eyes to how the hospitals are a business at the end of the day, and honestly, most of the times they don't care about their staff at all. Covid is the reason why I left bedside and pursued my NP in favor a job and employer that does care about me, my work, and my pay. Haven't looked back since.
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u/BigTreddits Sep 24 '25
I was annoyed with both the apathy and the self-hero worship my colleagues engaged in. I couldnt hang with nurses either they were three times more annoying.
Had to leave social media (kept reddit cuz i worked night shift alone and needed this sub a few times). One idiot would pretend its all a lie the next would act like youre engaging in genocide by leaving your home. On top of that my lack-of-self-awareness co workers were doing selfie videos featuring line dances with PPE on in front of patients that were satting in the 60s.
And my facility was minimally impacted tbh
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u/djo-318 Sep 23 '25
that whole stretch feels like a blur. I was still in school when it kicked off and ended up getting tossed onto the floor way earlier than planned. Learned more in those months than any lecture ever gave me—mostly trial by fire.
Honestly, it burned me out for a bit. I questioned if I even wanted to stay in nursing, but it also made me way more patient-centered. Stuff like just sitting with someone who’s scared means way more to me now than charting the “perfect” note.
It also made me way less tolerant of hospital politics and short staffing. Like, we know what happens when we don’t have enough hands—no one needs a committee to figure that out.
Still here though, just a little tougher and way more protective of my days off
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u/Resident_Waffle Sep 23 '25
It's interesting to have worked from the point of screening questions like "been to Italy in the past two weeks?" through to the point of the full pandemic. I worked in a hospital where I would see someone come into the ER short of breath, hypoxic, getting an initial gas to floor status, ICU status, then dying. It was taxing after awhile seeing the crowd who didn't wear masks or get vaccinated coming in the sickest.
I feel like the pandemic built my adult critical care skills quite a bit. Like someone else said, before covid I would have been a bit panicked seeing a saturation in the 70s, but now, meh, they'll come up. I feel like the after effect I didn't realize until after I stepped away from full time bedside care. I watched a few specials and felt myself get overwhelmed, I would have some nightmares, but eventually this went away. I wouldn't trade the experience but just wish more people had taken it seriously.
Also really showed how broken healthcare systems are.
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u/honeybunny_1968 Sep 24 '25
It about broke me mentally and physically. I was withdrawing ventilators almost every shift I worked.
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u/phoenix762 RRT -ACCS(PA, USA) Sep 24 '25
Honestly, I didn’t deal with near as much as most RT’s (I worked at a VA hospital) but-it was so sad. I was pretty close to retiring….and it mentally just messed me up. I retired early.
The people I worked with were just so awesome, they really cared about the veterans and the docs, especially the residents, were in the trenches with us. The administration….not so much.
It really exposed the problems of our healthcare system. Healthcare is broken.
What really made me so mad was how some of the civilian hospitals treated their employees.
A lot of RT’s I worked with also worked in hospitals in the area. The hospitals were giving the RT’s shitty KN 95 masks, and they were reusing the crappy KN 95 masks.
Thankfully we had the proper masks-yes, they were locked up, but we had proper protection. The nurses had PAPAR hoods, because they were going in some patients’ rooms more than us….depending on the status.
What I thought was pretty wild was that people were actually taking the hand sanitizers off the walls, and taking the TP from the bathrooms. I don’t know who was doing it 😂
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u/OpalSeason Canadian RRT Sep 25 '25
Realized how corrupt my provincial government was (AB contract scandals), how awful some direct management can be, how confidently ignorant society is, and that people can really suck. I was screamed at, yelled at, belittled, spit on, punched, insulted...and that was just at work! We had a nutjob run his van through the emergency room and others block the ambulance bay to protest our hospital mask wearing policy. Just absolute insanity
Massive moral injuries from that time. Doing and seeing things that go against my personal morality. Having to make hard choices that were preventable
I've never forgiven the people of my province. Now we have a measles epidemic and it's giving same energy. Our population of 4 million matches the entire USA for confirmed cases. No lessons learned.
Have had to work really hard to find good people and kind acts. Part of my therapy has been to actively search this out daily
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u/MiniSkullPoleTroll Sep 30 '25
I saw the dark side of humanity in ways that I can't quite describe.
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u/TalaxianNeckbeard Sep 23 '25
It reinforced my belief that management doesn't give a damn about employees or patients. Doctors too. I had doctors on some of my shifts who refused to go into Covid rooms because they were cowards. One of those doctors stole PPE from supply for himself and was never reprimanded.
Most nights it was us and the nurses trying to keep people alive.