ROBERT PIERCE
• Leader & Times
A department head at Seward County Community has been named to Gov. Laura Kelly’s Respiratory Care Council.
SCCC Director of Respiratory Therapy Janae Zachary practiced the medical art for six years at KU Med Center in Kansas City after graduating from SCCC in 2010, and while she said she loved her job, she did not love the life an urban city.
“We were both from small towns, my fiancé and I,” she said. “We’ve moved back here. That’s where his family is from. I met him while I was in school and came back and worked at Southwest Medical Center, but I felt I was stagnant.”
Zachary said she felt she needed more of a challenge at that time.
“I wanted to move up into leadership at the hospital, but the person who had been there had already been there 10 to 15 years and probably had 10 to 15 more to go,” she said. “That wasn’t a reality.”
So Zachary talked to instructors at SCCC who were getting ready to retire who encouraged her to try teaching, and this is what led her to teaching at the local community college.
Zachary explained respiratory care involves helping people with respiratory diseases or illnesses mainly of the lungs.
“That’s what we specialize in,” she said. “We can do breathing treatments and oxygen therapy, which is what we’re most known for, but we also do therapies that help move mucus and gunk out of people’s lungs.”
Zachary said therapy is done in effort to expand lungs to allow people to take deeper breaths.
“We also can do breathing for a patient with a mechanical ventilator and a tube, or we can do non-invasive, where we use the CPAP or the BiPAP with the mask, and that supports people’s breathing,” she said. “The critical care’s the fun cool side of what we get to do.”
Zachary was diagnosed with asthma at the age of 2, and this is largely what led her to the field of respiratory therapy.
“It was pretty bad,” she said. “I was in the hospital off and on, living in a rural community with lots of farming. I lived on a farm. I’m allergic to everything in Kansas basically when they got me tested, and here I am still living in Kansas.”
Even with allergy shots and medications, Zachary’s asthma remained uncontrolled until she got older and realized to begin taking breathing treatments.
“Because of all of that, I didn’t want to be a respiratory therapist because I didn’t want asthma to still control my whole life, but I knew I wanted to be in health care,” she said.
Initially, Zachary’s professional life started with her working as a Certified Nurses Aide at Hays Medical Center while working on her bachelor’s degree at Fort Hays State University.
“I started shadowing around,” she said. “I finally listened to my mother and followed a respiratory therapist around from back home, my friend’s dad who ran the department in Beloit.”
This is when Zachary said she realized how much she could relate to respiratory patients.
“I knew exactly what they were feeling when they can’t breathe and how scary that is, and I realized this is what I need to do,” she said.
As far as her goals at SCCC, Zachary said she had thought about utilizing her degrees in leadership.
“Sometimes with leadership, you think that means you have to move up to higher and higher positions in administration, executive type positions, but sometimes, that can just be helping out more within the school,” she said. “I’m active in my faculty association group, and that’s who negotiates with the board on behalf of all faculty. We work with them to help get good benefits, salary, pretty much anything that affects the work environment for faculty.”
As a department head at SCCC, Zachary helps with the school’s accreditation process.
“As part of my job as the director, I have to make sure we’re up to date and do what we need to annually so we meet thresholds for our own accreditation for the program,” she said. “We have to be an accredited program for our students to be able to graduate and sent forth for their national board exams.”
Zachary said she does miss working in medical facilities, but she felt she wanted more of a say in the quality of care given there.
“I wanted to move into a leadership,” she said. “I didn’t think that was going to happen at the hospital I was at. That person had been there. They had a lot of years left.”
Moving to education, Zachary said she could still have knowledge about the quality of care and teach students the right way to perform respiratory care.
“You can’t teach everybody to care, but you hope that rubs it off,” she said.
As an SCCC alum, Zachary has much respect for the program she now teaches in and the instructors who taught her who are now retired.
“We want to see our students succeed,” she said. “We want to see the program succeed. I think that makes us more invested than people who wouldn’t have went through the program.”
Now as a member of the Respiratory Care Council, Zachary said she is excited primarily to see the licensure side of health care when her students graduate.
“When students graduate and they try to get their license, sometimes that process can be lengthy, and I’m sure there’s a lot more that goes on behind the scenes than I’m aware of,” she said. “Unless the students put my name on there, they can’t release any information to me. Sometimes, the student needs to send them more documentation.”
Zachary said her work on the state council will likewise give her more knowledge to tell her students what can be done differently to better streamline the licensing process.
“Maybe I can help them come up with a better idea too,” she said.
Goals for Zachary on the Respiratory Care Council primarly include discussing student and temporary licensing.
“Temporary licensure is something they started around COVID because they know the initial licensing takes a while,” she said. “Students can only work on their student license. While they’re in the program, they can work as a student. They just can’t do things on their own when they’re working in the hospital, especially not critical care, and that license will only last 30 days after they graduate. They can’t work until they get their licensure.”
Instead, students have to pass their tests and apply for a license in the state in which they choose to work.
“The temporary license was signed so they can work for six months after graduation,” Zachary said.
Zachary said this is something she does not like.
“People will use that to not test for six months, and if you don’t test right away, data shows the longer they wait, the worse the test scores,” she said. “You have people out there getting to work who haven’t even tested, and that’s not as safe for the patient, and it’s not good for the student.”
Zachary said with COVID-19, the focus was more on getting the help needed to deal with the illness.
“I don’t know if that’s really necessary anymore,” she said. “It definitely doesn’t help the programs that are trying to get these students to take their tests and pass.”
There are many ways to protect respiratory health, and some may seem obvious, but Zachary said there are some that may not seem as obvious.
“Taking your medications as prescribed is a big one,” she said. “I realize it’s expensive, but make sure you understand when you’re supposed to take your medications. For respiratory illnesses, with a lot of them, if they take an inhaled steroid every day, it will help maintain and keep those airways open so they don’t have exacerbations like with asthma and COPD.”
In today’s world, vaping has become a popular trend, and Zachary said vaping proves even more dangerous than smoking due to the lack of smell and smoke.
“People are doing it all the time,” she said. “They’re not taking breaks like they do with cigarettes. You go out on a break, and you take a 10-minute break every four hours to smoke.”
Zachary said this does not have to be done with vaping.
“You can go to the bathroom and vape,” she said. “You can vape at your desk if you wanted to and got away with it. Those people are going to be worse off than smokers because they’re doing it so much more often.”
Zachary said COVID-19 also taught medical professionals to look at different ways to treat respiratory illnesses.
“Everybody was doing everything we’ve been taught, and it wasn’t working,” she said. “When every day is a bad day and you go there doing everything you were supposed to and you can and you’re still losing patients, that is scary. One thing everybody learned is you have to all work together.”
Teamwork, Zachary said, played a key role in getting through the pandemic.
“Everybody wants the recognition for being the best, but during that, it was just about survival,” she said. “There really wasn’t much more to learn. It was going into the critical thinking of what else do we have in our wheelhouse we can use and try. At that point, it was trial and error.”
Zachary said the respiratory system is the key component of the human body.
“The reason we breathe is to bring in oxygen,” she said. “We bring in oxygen for all of our cells in our body to work – our organs, our tissues. If you’re not breathing essentially, you’ll go into cardiac arrest and die. We always say if you don’t have a breathing patient, you don’t have a patient.”
Zachary called the respiratory system the glue that holds everything together in the body.
“Every bit of blood in your body has to go through the lungs to get oxygenated, and then it gets pumped out by the heart,” she said. “It goes everywhere else in your body to be used so everything functions.”
Zachary said a respiratory therapist’s job begins when a doctor gives a diagnosis of either a history of respiratory disease or simply a case of respiratory illness.
“They’ll call respiratory therapy,” she said. “We’ll come down and do an initial assessment and use our own knowledge. We can listen to breast sounds, and we can decide if they need a breathing treatment, mucus clearance, lung expansion.”
Zachary said X-rays need to be checked to tell doctors what is going on internally in a person.
“We can listen and do some assessment things, but we don’t really know what’s going on inside until we get blood work and a chest X-ray,” she said. “From there, we decide how severe this patient is, and that helps us guide how aggressive we get with the treatment.”
Zachary said premature babies are sometimes born without fully developed lungs.
“Their lungs don’t want to expand with air the way they’re supposed to,” she said. “It starts there where you might have to resuscitate a baby or put them on a mask or a tube to help them breathe for a while until their lungs develop and we can give them certain medications to help speed up that process to make their lungs easier to expand so we can oxygenate their body.”
Zachary said respiratory diseases can be acquired such as COPD, or they may be something a person is born with such as asthma or cystic fibrosis.
“Any of your neuromuscular diseases, because your chest wall and your diaphragm have muscles that help you breathe, if those are affected, they’re not able to breathe on their own all the time,” she said. “Anytime there’s an accident that happens where the airway might be compromised, we’re involved with that as well. We usually go in on any high risk delivery in case we would need to help resuscitate.”
Naturally, Zachary is excited to begin her work with the Respiratory Care Council, and while she feels there are many things she is unaware of that take place, she wants to give back and contribute.
“I’m always trying to come up with new ideas or new ways to make things better,” she said. “Sometimes, people don’t like change. I get that, but I’ve always seen change be awesome. Sometimes, if things aren’t working, change can be great.”
Most of all, Zachary is excited to contribute as much as she can and give the council a look at the teaching side of licensing.
“What can we do to make it better?” she said. “Maybe it’s something on the school side we need to change.”
