Clinical Practice III is the advanced clinical rotation of the respiratory care program. Students continue critical care rotations with exposure to specialized care areas — commonly including neonatal and pediatric intensive care — and complete the structured assignments that accompany the rotation: mini case studies, online simulations, disease sheets, ventilator worksheets, and an approved research paper. Students also complete a mock credentialing simulation examination and, at some institutions, submit a volunteer or service portfolio.
Within the SCNS taxonomy, RET is the Respiratory Care prefix, and the 8xx range identifies supervised clinical practice. RET2876 falls in the final year of the associate degree, following Clinical Practice I and II and preceding Clinical Practice IV or the program's capstone. It appears at approximately five Florida institutions. Daytona State publishes it at 4 credits, requires RET1875 as the prerequisite, offers it in fall, and attaches a substantial clinical fee.
This is where the program becomes a job. The didactic sequence produced a student who knows what to do; the clinical sequence produces a therapist a charge nurse will trust with an unstable patient at three in the morning. The two are not the same thing, and the gap closes in rotations like this one.
Clinical courses are the least standardized part of the Florida respiratory care curriculum, and the spread is not small. Comparable Clinical Practice III offerings across Florida institutions run from roughly 180 to over 250 contact hours for a similar credit value, and the credit values themselves differ:
The 240 contact hours reported here is derived, not quoted: it applies the approximately 60 clinical hours per credit ratio that both Valencia's published 3-credit/180-hour figure and this repository's own RET2877 (3 credits, 180 hours) support, scaled to Daytona State's published 4 credits. Treat it as an estimate and confirm the actual scheduled hours on the program's syllabus. Note also the suffix difference — Valencia uses RET2876L, Daytona State uses RET2876 — which means these are formally different SCNS numbers describing the same rotation.
The honest observation worth stating plainly: students who fail out of health programs at this stage almost never fail because they did not know enough. They fail on attendance, punctuality, professionalism, and safety.
Clinical sites are hosting students as a courtesy and can decline a student at any time, for any reason, without appeal to the college — and a student who cannot be placed cannot complete the program. Missing a shift without following the call-out procedure, arriving late repeatedly, arguing with a preceptor, using a phone at the bedside, or documenting a treatment that was not performed will end a program faster than any examination. Falsifying documentation in particular is treated as terminal at essentially every program and is also a licensure issue.
The counterpart is equally true and worth saying: clinical rotations are the most effective job interview in health care. Florida respiratory departments hire their students routinely, and a student who is reliable, prepared, and easy to teach frequently has an offer before graduation. Two behaviors do most of the work — arrive early having looked up the patients, and ask for the harder assignment.
Clinical placement requires Level 2 background screening under § 435.04 and § 456.0635, Florida Statutes, a drug screen, immunization and titer documentation, a TB screen, current BLS (and often ACLS) certification, and health insurance. Sites impose their own additional requirements and can refuse a student who does not meet them.
The critical point: certain criminal offenses are disqualifying for Florida health-profession licensure, not merely for placement. A student can complete an entire program, pass the boards, and then be denied a license. Any applicant with a criminal history should raise it with the program director before enrolling and, where appropriate, pursue an exemption determination — the process takes months and is far better resolved before tuition than after. A positive drug screen at a clinical site typically ends the rotation immediately and often the program.
At roughly 240 scheduled hours in a term, this course alone approaches a half-time job — unpaid, on the site's schedule, which commonly includes twelve-hour shifts, early mornings, weekends, and sometimes nights. Add the didactic courses running concurrently and the total load is substantial.
Students should plan for this deliberately: employment during the clinical year is difficult and often incompatible with the rotation schedule, and the clinical fee, parking, uniforms, and travel to sites are real additional costs. Program directors will say this at orientation; students who plan around it finish, and students who assume they can keep a full-time job through the clinical year frequently do not.
The mock credentialing simulation exam is not a formality. It is a scored dress rehearsal for the NBRC Clinical Simulation Examination, taken at the point where there is still a term left to fix what it reveals. Students should treat the result diagnostically: a weak information-gathering score and a strong decision-making score point to different remediation, and the program can direct that. Students who dismiss a poor mock result as "just practice" tend to meet the same gaps on the real CSE, where a retake costs money and delays licensure and employment.
RET2876 is a supervised clinical course — essentially all of its contact hours are at the clinical site, with limited seminar time. Daytona State publishes it at 4 credits with prerequisite RET1875, offers it in fall, and attaches a clinical fee. Assignments accompanying the rotation typically include disease sheets, ventilator worksheets, mini case studies, online simulations, and an approved research paper; some programs add a volunteer or service portfolio. Grading is generally competency-based: a defined list of procedures must be performed successfully a defined number of times, evaluated by a preceptor. Falling behind on competency sign-offs early in the term is difficult to recover from late, because opportunities depend on which patients happen to be in the unit.
The first digit of an SCNS number denotes the year of offering, not transferability. Courses at the 1000 and 2000 levels transfer transparently between Florida public institutions; 3000 to 4000 is also unproblematic, since both are upper division. The boundary that actually matters is 2000 to 3000, where lower-division credit generally cannot satisfy an upper-division requirement — relevant to respiratory care because several Florida institutions now offer a B.S. completion track with 3000- and 4000-level RET courses, and associate-level coursework does not substitute for those.
One practical caveat overrides all of the above in respiratory care: programs are accredited, lock-step cohorts with sequenced clinical placements, and they accept transfer into the professional sequence rarely and only case by case. A student moving between programs should expect to repeat coursework regardless of what SCNS says, and should get any transfer evaluation in writing before relying on it.
Generated September 2, 2026 · Updated September 2, 2026