OC’s respiratory care program preparing for 2025 start

Seeing the need for respiratory therapists in the community, Odessa College is preparing to revive its respiratory therapy program starting in August 2025.

Pending accreditation approval, OC will start its first class in August 2025. Students who want to enroll will be required to complete pre-requisite courses.

Students will be in the program for two years and be based in Odessa, serving counties in the West Texas region. Graduates will be eligible for national credentials and State of Texas Respiratory Care Practitioner licensing.

The respiratory care program is pending national and programmatic accreditation by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools and the Commission on Accreditation for Respiratory Care (CoARC).

Tiffany Gomez, director of clinical education, is heading the program. The program director is Robert Vega.

Gomez came on board about a month ago. OC had a respiratory care program some years ago, but it closed. But Medical Center Hospital and Odessa College came to an agreement that a program was needed again.

“We oversee the students as they progress through the program and how to become practitioners in the clinical setting,” Gomez said.

The program is meant to teach them about all the equipment and patient care.

Students will be able to hone their skills at the Medical Center Health System Simulation Hospital in the Wood Health Sciences Building.

“We expose them to the practice, basically by training them in the classroom and at the hospital as well. We also have our lab simulations here to prepare them before we even step foot in the hospital. We want to make sure that they can perform procedures on mannequins … and are comfortable with that, before they actually go perform on a real human. We want to get all the butterflies out of them, all the jitters and make sure that they’re confident when they walk in there because the patient is scared when you say the word student.”

Applications will open in May, but Gomez said they are conducting interviews for potential students interested to the program. The idea is to give students a roadmap of the prerequisites and what to expect from the program.

The first year, they plan to take 15 students. Once they get through the first year, Gomez said maybe they will grow by two each year.

She added that they want to have slow growth to ensure that the program has a high pass rate and a good success rate. They also want to make sure that the curriculum is built and developed so all students can be successful and pass the national exam.

They will have a state license wherever they live, but the exam is national.

“We are doing Zoom meetings. … Our advisors are doing a very good job at reaching out to some of the health science students that are taking basic courses and exposing them to the fact that we have a new program so that they can start thinking about if they want to do health care … Not very many people know about respiratory (care).

“They understand that there’s asthma and they understand that there’s COPD, but they don’t really understand that there’s one person that is focused on treating that. There’s nursing, but nursing can help with asthma, or nursing can help manage someone who’s smoking, but they’re not specialists in the lungs. They consider our profession a specialty, because we do focus so much on just the lungs,” Gomez said.

Respiratory care is focused more on cardiopulmonary — heart and lungs together. Students will learn how to diagnose and assist pulmonologists.

“No one really knew about the career up until COVID. Once COVID came it exploded and that was because there was such a great shortage and a need for respiratory,” Gomez said.

Starting out, it will just be Gomez and Vega, but they will expand to clinic instructors to monitor students. There will be nine clinical sites, Gomez said.

“It’s going to be a very competitive program to enter,” she added.

Gomez got her prerequisites at Odessa College. She was going for nursing, but realized it wasn’t for her. She still wanted to be in health care, though.

At the time, she had a family member in a respiratory care program at Midland College. Her family member told Gomez about what she was learning and Gomez thought it was interesting. Gomez applied and was accepted. The next day, she was performing CPR on a mannequin.

“I was terrified, because I thought to myself, this is just too much. This is too intense. Second day was class, and I’m on this mannequin giving it breaths … After that, I realized I wasn’t afraid. I was actually more intrigued, you know, and so it just kept going. As the program continued, I was learning more and more, and I just enjoyed every bit of it,” Gomez said.

She started at Midland Memorial Hospital as a respiratory therapist and was there for six years.

While she was there, she went back to school for a bachelor’s degree in organizational management (from Midland College). “I also worked at Encompass rehab, because I wanted a different feel for not just critical care. Then during COVID, I transitioned to Medical Center for a little while, got exposed to that hospital, and then went back to school for my master’s at UTPB and I did my master’s in business administration with the certification of public health from UT Houston, Health Houston,” Gomez said.

She did that because she knew at some point she would want to be at the administrative level. Gomez figured that if that didn’t work out, she could transition to something else.

“But I kept the certification in public health because it was also interesting to me, because it really incorporates the diseases in your community, how people eat, your expectancy of life, depending on your race, you really learn about that. Being a respiratory therapist, I could use that knowledge when I’m teaching my patients about not smoking, not vaping, about how diabetes can affect different things, just really more knowledge to help understand the profession and the disease process that they go through with things like lung cancer, or a lot of the genetic diseases,” Gomez said.

She’s also planning to get a doctorate from Abilene Christian University, possibly in educational leadership with a focus on healthcare education.

Gomez said she is glad to be helping to restart the respiratory care program.

“I’m very grateful, first of all, because I feel like this is an opportunity that not everyone gets, especially because a lot of the programs are already established, and they’ve been established for years. … But I also feel that it’s a lot of responsibility. There are a lot of eyes looking at me; a lot of pressure as far as the success of the program; our curriculum; seeing how the students respond to it, and how their test scores come about,” she said.

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