Amanda Antol, left, sits strapped to “The Vest” airway clearance system and talks to professor Jason Trautman during a respiratory therapy program class at the Community College of Allegheny County. (Photo by Clare Sheedy/PublicSource)
Health and medicine have become pillars of the Pittsburgh economy, but training programs are struggling to attract students in fields with poor job satisfaction.
by Naomi Harris, PublicSource
The respiratory therapists, dressed in blue scrubs, have gathered near the patient. One measures breathing with a stethoscope, others monitor the heartbeat on the screen.
The students are just days from graduating but on this day they’re not treating an actual patient. The Community College of Allegheny County has sent out a photographer to capture what it’s like to be in the lab — in an effort to help pitch the program to new students.
Education and medicine, or “eds and meds,” have been heralded for fueling the Pittsburgh region’s economic renaissance. At a critical time in public health, enrollment is plummeting in programs like the respiratory therapy one, which had only half as many students in 2020 as in 2018. Across the community college’s allied-health programs, enrollment fell by nearly 6% during that same period.
The future rests on training new workers for those careers and drawing new people into them. Across the country, there’s a 98,700-person shortage of medical and lab technicians, according to reports. And, keeping the people who are already in those and other allied health jobs is a challenge, too.
In Pittsburgh, more than 90% of hospital workers thought of leaving the profession, according to a recent survey by the University of Pittsburgh. Hospital workers who participated in the study reported insufficient staffing, mental and emotional exhaustion, and a need for better wages.
For many people the jobs can pay off, but not always. The careers that fall under the allied health umbrella are varied, requiring different levels of education. They’re sometimes little known, often undervalued, and — in the midst of the pandemic — increasingly difficult to fill.
The last couple of years have exacerbated the supply and demand challenges in the health-care field, but they’ve been brewing for much longer, says Ray Engel, a professor of social work at the University of Pittsburgh who has spent the past five years researching the working conditions of hospital workers.
“People appreciate the roles that healthcare systems are playing in changing what Pittsburgh looks like,” he said, transforming it from an industrial town over the past 20 years to one driven by educational institutions and healthcare settings. “There’s a general sense of value to that work.”
But, he added, people haven’t appreciated many of those jobs, and the people doing them, enough. “We find it ironic that it was only with the pandemic that people started to see, particularly lower wage workers, as suddenly essential.”
About Post Author
