She walked us through the adult intensive care unit and the medical ward at the KHMH, where she tends to her patients daily. Each one has a different ailment, but all of them require the same care from her - and that is to help them to breathe with the assistance of machines. Jomarie Lanza met the hospital's only Respiratory Therapist, Bertha Gonzalez and she gave us some insight as to what her job entails. Here's that story.
She is one of the most valuable specialists at the KHMH, and spends a lot of her time educating her team members on how they too can better assist patients that are struggling to breathe. Bertha Gonzalez is the only Belizean Respiratory Therapist at the hospital, she specializes in intubating patients in the ICU, monitoring their breathing and managing the machines.
Bertha Gonzalez, Respiratory Therapist, KHMH
"Basically what I do is to help people breathe better a little better right so I work mainly with intensive care patients right so it could be newborns to toddlers and adults and to elderly people."
"So my job is basically I am an extra pair of eyes for the intensivists, the MO's here and I'm an extra hand for the nurses as well we work as a team and in my case I would have to assess the patient's airway right so most of them like at this moment we have everybody on ventilators they have a tube in their trachea that we call the endotracheal tube and so that one is conducted to this one so when I go and see the patient I have to make sure that the tube is in properly that the distance is the correct one and I have to make sure the machine is going to par with the patient itself we do that based on lab you know like a blood test so we would take a blood sample and we would see if we need to make changes on the machine."
Gonzalez has been working at the KHMH for the past 16 years. Most of her patients consist of the elderly with medical complications and premature babies in the NICU. But often a large percentage of those patients are RTA victims who are placed on ventilators. She says their patient intake has changed a lot since Covid, when they had to care for dozens of persons at a time with respiratory complications.
Bertha Gonzalez, Respiratory Therapist, KHMH
"During covid we got a lot of, we were handling about 35 ventilators at that time. We did get a lot of inflow of I would say basically donations at the time and we were using a lot of ventilators and high flow machines right we even used sometimes the home devices which is basically the C pap and Bi Pap machines. So it's been a transition from you know the amount of ventilators that were available at the time to this time now."
"At the moment I am the only respiratory therapist at the KHMh we do need another person, ideally maybe 2, but you know we have a lack of staff in the entire country when it comes to medical staff so at KHMH its a teaching hospital so we have the medical officers and we have the nurses and everybody has to be in tune and be a little bit knowledgeable when it comes to the ventilators right and the equipment. In my case you have to keep up to date because you never know when you are going to get a new machine so if you notice this is one kind of machine here but we get different modules so I have to be using the different types of modules and knowing how each one operates."
Gonzalez decided to pursue this specialty after seeing the need for a respiratory therapist in country. They needed someone to learn how to work with the machines that often are the only thing that stands between life and death for a patient
Bertha Gonzalez, Respiratory Therapist, KHMH
"I would encourage people if they you know are thinking of trying to get into another field, respiratory therapy is a good field to get into. You could go all the way from being the technician in the hospital field you can go all the way to being managerial post especially in other countries you have a bigger array of um."
"Of fields that you can get into we work from the ambulance setting, the emergency setting, you know back in the day when I just started I had to go in the ambulance several times for patient transportation right it doesn't happen that much more anymore because we have a lot more medical officers so they are the ones that are doing that at the moment right we get a very versatile amount of things to do we have to be very creative in the sense of looking and seeing what the patient actually needs at the moment and providing that support."
Those who wish to contact Gonzalez for a consultation can reach her through CPap Now Belize, at 625-4589 or 625-4420
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