When 22-year-old Dalin Hatch strides across the stage at Indiana University–Indianapolis next month to collect his license, he will walk straight into a full-time job at Riley Hospital for Children and straight into one of the biggest staffing crunches in local health care. Hospital leaders say a worsening shortage of respiratory therapists is stretching units that care for everyone from fragile preemies to adults with COPD, and they are scrambling to expand training and get students to the bedside sooner. It is not just a hiring headache. Respiratory therapists run ventilators, perform pulmonary tests and handle complex breathing issues that require highly specialized skills.
Staffing numbers and urgency
IU Health officials say vacancy rates look very different from unit to unit, but the overall trend has been rough. The system lost about 70 respiratory therapists in the wake of the pandemic before it began rebuilding. Beth Summitt, IU Health's executive director of respiratory care services, told WRTV the system now employs around 400 therapists and is aiming to fill roughly 30 to 40 openings over the next year.
The pipeline problem is bigger than one hospital network. The National Board of Respiratory Care estimates that nearly 100,000 therapists could leave the profession by the end of the decade, a projection that has hospital leaders talking less about quick fixes and more about survival mode for the workforce.
How IU Health is training new respiratory therapists
To grow its own talent, IU Health leads a consortium that funnels respiratory therapy students from Indiana University, Ball State and the University of Indianapolis into clinical rotations at central Indiana hospitals. The idea is to get students into high-acuity environments earlier, especially pediatrics, so they are not meeting a ventilated newborn for the first time after they are already on the job.
Riley Children's Health says the program helps students who might otherwise sidestep pediatric clinicals altogether and instead gives them focused experience with ventilated infants and complex pediatric respiratory conditions. Hatch, who works as a respiratory therapy assistant, grew up with asthma himself and is finishing his degree this spring. He has already committed to stay at Riley as a licensed respiratory therapist, according to Riley Children's Health, putting a personal face on the hospital's training strategy.
What the numbers show
National labor data back up what Indiana hospitals are feeling on the ground. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects jobs for respiratory therapists will grow about 12% from 2024 to 2034, which is faster than the average for all occupations. The agency notes that therapists care for patients across the lifespan, from premature babies to older adults with COPD, and that the role blends technical expertise with hands-on bedside care. That combination, hospital leaders say, makes deep clinical training nonnegotiable and helps explain why schools and health systems are scrambling to add clinical spots and speed up entry into the field.
Hiring moves and incentives
IU Health is actively recruiting respiratory therapists across its hospitals, and some openings come with financial sweeteners. Job listings on the IU Health careers site show sign-on and relocation bonuses for advanced roles, along with multiple postings at Riley and other facilities, signaling that this is a system-wide push, not a one-unit patch job.
Officials say those incentives are being paired with outreach to high schools and community colleges in hopes of nudging more students toward respiratory care early and keeping them there. In their view, the fastest way to close the gap is to bring more students into hands-on pediatric and adult clinicals now and hope they follow the same path as Hatch, from student to long-term hire.
For more detail on IU Health's efforts to shore up the respiratory therapy workforce, see the original coverage from WTHR.
