RET3028L is the laboratory that accompanies RET3028, the foundations course in a baccalaureate respiratory care curriculum. It is a one-credit course and the place where a student first handles the equipment the profession runs on.
UWF describes it as a "lab-based course [that] reinforces understanding of the role of the respiratory care practitioner within the clinical setting," with emphasis on "correct setup and application of equipment, techniques, and therapies for respiratory care." Activities include medical gas administration, patient assessment skills, respiratory therapeutics, patient safety techniques, blood gas analysis and airway care.
The division of labour between lecture and laboratory is the usual one and it is worth understanding. The lecture explains why a device works; the laboratory establishes that you can make it work — assembled correctly, connected correctly, verified, and safe on a patient who is depending on it. In respiratory care the gap between those two things is unusually consequential, because much of the equipment delivers a gas or a drug directly into someone's lungs and an assembly error is not self-correcting.
⚠ This course and RET3028 are reciprocal corequisites: neither can be taken alone. You register for both, for four credits between them, and receive two grades.
Two Florida public institutions carry this number: the University of West Florida and Florida A&M University, both at one credit.
⚠ This is a one-credit laboratory within a professional sequence rather than a course with its own destination — the career pathway is that of the programme it belongs to. In brief:
⚠⚠ What this laboratory contributes to that pathway is disproportionate to its credit value. The psychomotor competencies established here are assessed again in every clinical practicum and are what a clinical preceptor evaluates from the first rotation. A student who is fluent with equipment arrives in clinical able to attend to the patient; a student who is not spends the rotation attending to the equipment.
| Institution | Its title | Credits | Contact hours |
|---|---|---|---|
| University of West Florida (SUS) | Foundations of Respiratory Therapy Lab | 1 | not published |
| Florida A&M University (SUS) | Fundamentals of Respiratory Therapy Lab | 1 | not published |
Both carriers award one credit and the titles differ only in Fundamentals against Foundations. ⚠ Florida's statewide record gives this laboratory the same title as its lecture — Fundamentals of Respiratory Therapy (U) — with no separate description, so the statewide record cannot distinguish the two halves at all. Both institutions do, in their own catalogues.
⚠ FAMU's catalogue was not reachable when this guide was written (its platform returns empty responses to automated retrieval), so the detail above is from UWF's published description and the statewide record. FAMU students should treat their own syllabus as governing.
The 30 contact hours recorded here is derived, and the derivation matters more than usual for a laboratory: a one-credit laboratory in Florida conventionally carries two to three contact hours a week, so roughly 30 to 45 hours across a term. Neither carrier publishes a figure; 30 is the lower end of that convention.
This is the practical warning a one-credit laboratory guide most owes its reader, and it catches students every year.
Students plan their term around credits and are caught by hours. A one-credit laboratory occupies two to three scheduled hours a week — the same block as a three-credit lecture — and in a skills course it also requires practice time outside the session, because competency checklists are assessed on performance rather than attendance. ⚠ Budget for it as you would a three-credit course, not a one-credit one, and find out early whether the laboratory is open for practice outside scheduled hours.
⚠ It also carries a disproportionate risk to your grade point average relative to its credit value in one direction only: a failed competency can mean a failed course, and a failed course in a cohort-based programme means repeating the pair — see below.
UWF lists RET3028 as a corequisite of this laboratory, and the laboratory as a corequisite of RET3028. The pairing is reciprocal and enforced in both directions.
Respiratory care programmes run as cohorts: courses are offered once a year in a fixed sequence, each gated on the last, with clinical placements arranged around that sequence.
⚠ So a failure does not delay you a term — it delays you until the course runs again, usually a full year, and may require re-applying for a place. In a laboratory assessed by competency checklist, that arithmetic is worth understanding in week one.
Worth stating in every course of a professional sequence, because it is the most expensive misunderstanding available in allied health.
CoARC accredits respiratory care programmes as programmes — separately as entry into professional practice (associate, baccalaureate or master's) and as degree advancement for therapists who are already credentialed. ⚠⚠ Eligibility to sit the NBRC credentialing examinations runs through completing an appropriate accredited programme, not through accumulating transferable credits.
A student can hold credit for every course in a sequence and still be ineligible, if the programme as a whole was not completed. Confirm your programme's CoARC accreditation status and type, and verify current requirements with CoARC, the NBRC and the Florida Board of Respiratory Care — not from a catalogue, and not from this guide.
The first laboratory in the professional sequence, taken with RET3028 and normally alongside RET3493/RET3493L (Patient Assessment and its laboratory) and the first clinical practicum, RET3884.
⚠ It is a 3000-level course carrying upper-division credit. 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. It is marked for dual enrolment with elective high-school credit, but ⚠ every active RET number carries that identical marking, so it is prefix-wide boilerplate.
⚠⚠ Transfer of a competency-based laboratory deserves particular care. A receiving programme may accept the credit and still require its own laboratory, because it must be able to attest to your competencies for accreditation purposes. Keep your competency checklist and syllabus, and get any evaluation in writing.
⚠⚠ This is a psychomotor skills course, and that makes its relationship to AI unusually simple: the thing being assessed cannot be generated. No tool assembles a circuit, verifies a delivered oxygen concentration, draws an arterial sample or suctions an airway. The competency checklist is performed under observation, and there is no shortcut to the hands.
That is worth saying plainly rather than treating as obvious, because it is genuinely good news in a curriculum where many courses now have an awkward relationship with these tools. What this laboratory teaches is exactly what remains scarce.
Where the tools do help, narrowly: rehearsing a procedure's sequence before a session, having a device's operating principle explained in a different way than the textbook did, and generating practice questions on equipment function. Used to prepare for a laboratory you then attend fully, that is a real gain.
⚠ The failure mode to name is device-specific and clinical. Ask a model for setup parameters, alarm limits or device settings and it will produce specific numbers — which vary by manufacturer, by model, by institutional protocol and by patient. The operative source is the device's own manual, your programme's checklist, and at clinical the site's protocol. Getting used to checking those now is the habit the profession runs on, and a therapist who defers to a generated number over a device manual has made a category error that will be obvious to any preceptor.
One forward-looking point, since this is a first-term course. Respiratory therapists already supervise automated systems — closed-loop ventilator modes, automated sleep scoring, early-warning algorithms — and the profession's standard for them is the one this laboratory is quietly teaching: verify the output against an independent observation of the patient. A number on a screen that disagrees with the person in the bed is a reason to look harder at both, and the habit of actually looking is built here.
Generated September 15, 2026 · Updated September 15, 2026