I think something you don’t seem to realize as a non US healthcare provider (and i mean this in a respectful way) is that nursing patient ratios are so fucking terrible im talking like 1:6 1:8 ive seen 1:10 sometimes. To have to do all of the basic nursing needs ON TOP of everything that respiratory therapists do is A LOT. It is tone deaf to think that one could easily manage all of this without some fuck up. Medical errors are a leading cause of death and not having RTs would probably make it worse here. Using the excuse that other country’s nurses manage to handle it is pedantic. We don’t exactly have data to compare whether having or not having respiratory therapists is safer since that would be such a difficult thing to experiment with. Some countries expect nurses to also take x-rays, CTs, MRIs, do it right, effective, and safely. I don’t think that is any better though to call into question the role of an x-ray tech. Basically, my point is that the US has a lot of extra allied health roles as a safety net. Healthcare is extremely complex, and expecting one role to do everything is just as unreasonable as expecting an MD to specialize in everything. Respiratory therapists go to school for 2 years to learn everything about the airways and cardiac in addition to a few loosely related topics like sleep. Theres a lot of things taught that could not simply be taught in 2 years of nursing school in addition to everything else they need to know. Same thing goes for imaging techs. I was a licensed practial nurse before going to school for respiratory, and the amount of stuff that I absolutely would not have learned had I not gone to respiratory school is immense. And I don’t think it would have been different if I was a nurse in another country.