Sunday, February 9, 2025

Zachary named to Governor’s Kansas Respiratory Care Council

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LIBERAL – Seward County Community College (SCCC), Director of Respiratory Therapy, Janae Zachary, practiced the medical art for six months at KU Med Center in Kansas City, after graduating from SCCC in 2010, in Liberal, Kan., and while she said she loved her job, she did not love the life in urban city.

“We were both from small towns, my fiancé and I,” Zachary 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 graduated from Beloit High School in 2004.

Zachary said she felt she needed more of a challenge at the time, after being at Southwest Medical Center for six years.

“I wanted to move up in leadership at the hospital, but the person who had been there in the respiratory director role 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 two, 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 am allergic to everything in Kansas, basically, after being 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 how to manage it better.

“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.”

Zachary helps with the college’s accreditation process by volunteering to be on this committee.

“As part of my job as the director, I have to make sure we’re up to date and do what we need to do 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 be eligible to sit 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 leadership,” she said. “I didn’t think that was going to happen at the hospital I was at. That person had been there for 10 years. They had a lot of years left.”

Moving to education, Zachary said she could share her 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 it rubs off,” she said.

As an SCCC alumni, Zachary and her co-worker Arlette Austin, have much respect for the program they now teach in, and the instructors who taught them 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 for 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,” Zachary 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 primarily 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 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.

Naturally, Zachary is excited to begin her work with the Kansas 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.