It’s not often that you see the words “ventilator” and “speed dating” in the same sentence, but that is probably the best way to describe an interdisciplinary activity that occurred at the Health Education Center (HEC) last week.

Three sophomore Respiratory Therapy (RT) students worked with the over 82 level-4 nursing students to help them become more comfortable with the Servo I, Puritan Bennett 840, and Drager Evita XL mechanical ventilators.

Each group of nursing students had 20 minutes of “hands-on” time with each ventilator with the second-year RT student serving as their coach. This gave the nursing students the rare opportunity to try different things with the ventilators without putting patients at risk, and have an RT student there to answer any questions. The “speed dating format” helped make sure that all the students had a chance to work with all three vents.

The nursing and RT programs have a long history of working together on interdisciplinary projects. In 2015 alone the two programs worked together on mock codes, simple spirometry, and other cross training opportunities.