Jason Morrison wants to be in the center of the action when it comes to saving a life.
A 2011 graduate of the Collin College Respiratory Care program, he said that is what convinced him to join the program after years in the shipping and logistics business.
His wife, a nurse for 14 years now, was a Collin College graduate who had friends from the respiratory care program.
“They said ‘When somebody is trying to die, they call you,’ and that was it for me,” Morrison said. “I got my prerequisites out of the way, got into the program and went on from there.”
He said he liked the idea of being active in an emergency and being part of the Code Blue team.
“If an emergency happens at a hospital, you are one of the people in the hospital who is right in the middle of it,” he said.
Morrison had considered going into the medical field from an early age, but decided to take another path when he got to college. To support his education, he took a job with UPS. The money and advancement were hard to turn down, so when another opportunity came along he took that as well. Pretty soon, he found himself working full time and putting college on the back burner.
Now a critical care Team Lead at Methodist Dallas Medical Center and last year’s chair of the program’s advisory board, he said attending Collin College’s Respiratory Care program was a great choice for him.
“I can’t say enough about Collin College,” Morrison said, giving a specific shoutout to Professor Kelley Reynolds. “They will ingrain in you everything you need to know and give you every tool to succeed. They let you know what is coming and will instill in you things that you will (continue to) use five years later.”
It’s no wonder that the program has received the Distinguished Registered Respiratory Therapist Credentialing Success Award for eight years in a row. The award is partly based on employer satisfaction surveys that rate graduates on their knowledge base, clinical proficiency, and behavioral skills.
Methodist Dallas has affirmed that belief time and again, hiring multiple grads every year for the past several years, according to Morrison.
“The students from Collin are more well-prepared to start their careers and it takes less training in the hospital to be a valuable team member,” he said. “I guess I am a little bit biased because I am from there, but to me there is no better student to hire straight out of school than one from Collin.”
Respiratory Care Program Director Araceli Solis said the program has state-of-the-art resources and that students are trained by respiratory therapists with extensive clinical experience on the same machines that are used in hospitals.
“Collin College’s Respiratory Care Program is relied upon to provide quality therapists to our local community,” Solis said.
Morrison got a job with Methodist Dallas before he graduated college. He got into the adult side of critical care, worked that for three years and has been in charge of the critical care unit for seven years.
In that role, he was part of the team who prepped the hospital for its COVID-19 response. His department was working with pulmonologists in mid-March when the state of Washington was being hit hard by the disease.
“We saw how they were getting completely overrun,” he said. We were putting together contingency plans so that would not happen to us.”
The pulmonologists knew it was coming. They saw how bad it could be, Morrison said. The pause between the first cases in the U.S. and those in Dallas gave the hospital staff time to prepare – find the best ways to treat it, determine what works and what doesn’t. They made plans for equipment and beds and reopened parts of the hospital which had not been open for some time.
“We were playing musical chairs with patients around the hospital to try and contain it,” Morrison said, but added, “I can’t recall one case of cross-contamination where someone in our hospital has contracted it here.”
That type of response and attention to patient care is why Collin College works so hard to prepare its students to face the challenges of respiratory-related illnesses.
“As COVID cases increased, our program worked diligently to ensure students graduated on time to provide these areas the support they needed as intensive care units grew busier,” Solis said. “Respiratory therapists are working the front lines of this pandemic as many of the COVID patients require ventilatory support, and it is respiratory therapists that manage these critical care ventilators. Respiratory therapists work closely with physicians and nurses to provide care for these patients. There is a need for respiratory therapists in all facilities.”