Once an RT, Always an RT
September 6, 2007
It’s been some years now since David Barton, RRT, PhD, practiced respiratory care, but he fully admits it must be in his blood.
Now a teacher at the Virginia Episcopal School (VES), a coeducational day and boarding school in Lynchburg, he recently decided to team his previous profession up with his current one by having Donna Stallard, RRT, from the respiratory care department at Centra Health’s Lynchburg General Hospital, come into his classroom to conduct pulmonary function tests on the kids.
The goal was to use PFTs to educate the students – who are taking statistics with Dr. Barton – about the statistical analysis that goes into these tests.
“I wanted to expose the students to something new and different and break the monotony of routine classroom instruction. They also got to learn a little about pulmonary physiology and PFTs,” says the educator.
He plans to have the students analyze the data in a variety of ways as the year progresses, starting out with simply identifying the types of variables that are collected and progressing to calculating means, standard deviations, t-tests, correlation, and regression.
Dr. Barton says the students enjoyed learning about PFTs and he plans to repeat the exercise next year. While he didn’t use the session to formerly introduce the profession to the kids, he says he does “take every opportunity to recall in class some of my experiences in RT and tie those experiences to whatever topic we are covering.”
But next time he launches the PFT project he might just take that next step. “I do think it would be worthwhile to perhaps spend part of a classroom period near the beginning of the year explaining what RT is all about. It makes sense to do this as a lot of the projects are RT related.”
Dr. Barton entered the RT profession back in 1975 and worked in the NICU and adult areas until the late 1980s, when he earned his master’s degree in exercise physiology and then went on to get his PhD in education research. He spent the 1990s and some of the 2000s doing data analysis/statistics work in the health care and pharmaceutical industries, but three years ago had an “inner calling” to turn his talents to the education of young people. He’s currently in his second year at VES, teaching statistics and coaching cross country and track.