RET3028 is the first respiratory therapy course in a baccalaureate respiratory care curriculum — the one that introduces the profession and the physical science it rests on.
UWF describes it as "a comprehensive introduction to the respiratory care profession," providing "theory and application of physics, chemistry, basic therapeutics, and disease management for respiratory therapists," and covering infection control, therapeutic devices, patient assessment skills, medical gas administration, aerosol drug delivery, and medical terminology.
The physics and chemistry are not preliminaries to be got through. Respiratory care is the clinical application of gas physics — pressure, flow, resistance, compliance, humidity, diffusion and solubility — and a therapist who does not genuinely understand them cannot reason about a ventilator, a nebuliser or a blood gas. Students who treat this course as introductory vocabulary find that every later course assumes they did not.
⚠ The course is taken with its laboratory, RET3028L, as a corequisite. The lecture supplies the theory; the laboratory is where equipment is actually handled. They are registered together and neither stands alone — see Special Information.
⚠⚠ This is an entry-into-practice course, not a degree-completion one, and the distinction matters a great deal in this field. It is dealt with below, because it determines what your degree qualifies you to do.
Two Florida public institutions carry this number: the University of West Florida and Florida A&M University, both at three credits.
| Institution | Its title | Credits | Contact hours |
|---|---|---|---|
| University of West Florida (SUS) | Foundations of Respiratory Therapy | 3 | not published |
| Florida A&M University (SUS) | Fundamentals of Respiratory Therapy | 3 | not published |
Both carriers award three credits. The statewide title is Fundamentals of Respiratory Therapy (U) — FAMU matches it; UWF says "Foundations". ⚠ Fundamentals and Foundations are the same course, and the difference is not worth a second thought.
⚠ FAMU's catalogue was not reachable when this guide was written — its platform returns empty responses to automated retrieval — so the detail above comes from UWF's published description and Florida's statewide record. FAMU students should treat their own syllabus as governing.
The 45 contact hours recorded here is Florida's convention for a three-credit lecture course; the laboratory hours sit in the corequisite RET3028L. ⚠ Note the statewide description for this number is a placeholder — it repeats the course title and says nothing else — so UWF's description is doing all the work here.
UWF lists RET3028L as a corequisite, and the laboratory lists this course as its corequisite in return. The reciprocal pairing means neither can be taken alone: the pair is the course.
Three consequences worth knowing:
UWF requires BSC 1085/L and BSC 1086/L (Anatomy and Physiology I and II with laboratories), CHM 2045/L (General Chemistry I with laboratory) and MCB 2010/L (Microbiology with laboratory).
That is four science courses with four laboratories, and it is the standard allied-health prerequisite block. ⚠⚠ Two things follow that students consistently underestimate.
First, these take time — typically two to three terms — and they are usually completed before admission to the professional sequence rather than alongside it. Plan backwards from the term you intend to start the RET sequence.
⚠ Second, and more important: Anatomy and Physiology is the course most likely to end a health-professions plan, and it is worth taking seriously rather than fitting around other commitments. ⚠ Note also that Florida numbers A&P under two competing prefixes — BSC2085C/BSC2086C and APK2100C/APK2105C — and health-professions prerequisites almost always name the BSC numbers. UWF names BSC 1085/L and BSC 1086/L specifically. Check the exact numbers your programme requires before enrolling in an A&P course at another institution.
This is the single most important thing to understand about a baccalaureate respiratory care programme, and course catalogues almost never explain it.
CoARC accredits two different kinds of respiratory care programme, and they serve entirely different students:
| Entry into Professional Practice | Degree Advancement (post-professional) |
|---|---|
| for students becoming respiratory therapists | for therapists who are already credentialed |
| accredited at associate, baccalaureate and master's level | accredited at baccalaureate and master's level |
| includes the full clinical sequence | builds on credentials already held; no entry-level clinical sequence |
| prepares you to sit the credentialing examinations | advances the degree of someone who has already sat them |
⚠⚠ This course belongs to an entry-into-practice programme. The evidence is in the curriculum itself: a foundations course with a laboratory, a four-course clinical practicum sequence, and a final practicum whose description states that "all clinical competencies expected of new graduates for entry into respiratory therapy practice must be completed." That is an entry-level programme producing new therapists.
Why it matters so much. ⚠⚠⚠ Eligibility to sit the credentialing examinations runs through completing an appropriate accredited programme — not through accumulating transferable credits. A student can pass every course in this sequence at institutions that individually grant credit and still not be eligible, if they have not completed an accredited programme as a programme. This is the same structure that governs nursing and medical laboratory science, and it is the most expensive misunderstanding available in allied health.
What to do: confirm your programme's CoARC accreditation status and its type before enrolling, and again before transferring anything. Verify current requirements directly with CoARC, the NBRC and the Florida Board of Respiratory Care — not from a catalogue and not from this guide.
Respiratory care programmes are cohort-based. Courses are offered once a year in a fixed sequence, each gated on the last, with clinical placements arranged around that sequence.
⚠ The consequence is that a failed course does not delay you by one term — it delays you until that course runs again, which is usually a full year, and it may require re-applying for a place. This is not unique to respiratory care; it is how nursing and most allied-health programmes work. But it makes the arithmetic of a marginal grade different from the rest of the university, and it is worth knowing in your first term rather than your third.
The first professional course, taken with its laboratory and normally alongside RET3493/RET3493L (Patient Assessment) and the first clinical practicum, RET3884.
⚠ It is a 3000-level course and carries upper-division credit, which a bachelor's degree requires.
Florida's statewide record classifies it as transferable to an institution offering the same course, with no Gordon Rule designation and no general-education category — programme coursework. It is marked for dual enrolment with elective high-school credit, but ⚠ every active number in the RET prefix carries that identical marking, so it is prefix-wide boilerplate rather than a fact about this course.
⚠⚠ Treat transfer into or out of a respiratory care sequence with particular care. Credit transfers between Florida public institutions, but the programme is accredited as a whole, cohort-sequenced, and clinically placed — so a receiving programme may well accept your credit and still require you to take its own version. Get any evaluation in writing, and ask specifically about accreditation and clinical sequence, not just credit.
Respiratory therapists work surrounded by algorithms already. Ventilators run closed-loop modes that adjust support automatically; monitoring systems generate early-warning scores; sleep laboratories use automated scoring that a technologist then edits. A student entering this profession will supervise automated systems as a routine part of the job, which makes the reasoning habits worth building now.
The obvious caution first, and it is sharp in a clinical field. Clinical questions asked of a general-purpose language model produce confident, specific, plausible answers — drug doses, ventilator settings, normal values, device parameters — and being wrong about any of those has patient consequences. Training data ages, guidelines are revised, and nothing in a generated answer indicates which edition or which institution's protocol it reflects. ⚠ Verify against the AARC Clinical Practice Guidelines, your textbook, and above all your clinical site's own protocols, which are the operative standard where you are working.
There is a more specific point that belongs in a foundations course, because it concerns how you build understanding rather than how you look things up.
This course teaches the physics that everything later depends on. A model will happily produce the answer to a gas-law problem, a cylinder duration calculation or an FIO2 estimate. ⚠⚠ The arithmetic is not the skill. The skill is knowing which relationship applies, what happens to the answer when a variable moves, and recognising when a number is physically impossible. A therapist at the bedside noticing that a delivered oxygen concentration cannot be what the device claims is doing something no calculator did for them — and that recognition is built by working the problems, not by reading solutions.
⚠ There is a straightforward way to use these tools without losing that: work the problem yourself first, then ask for a check or an explanation of a step you could not follow. Reversing the order feels faster in the first term and is expensive in the fourth, when the material is assumed rather than taught and the credentialing examination tests reasoning rather than recall.
Generated September 15, 2026 · Updated September 15, 2026