News, advice, and insights for nurses and the people who hire them.
Violence was escalating in the city of Port Harcourt, Nigeria, when Seattle-based operating nurse Louise Fang arrived in early 2007 to start her first of three assignments with Doctors Without Borders/Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF). Having recently retired from a US veterans’ hospital, Fang would no...
Read more →Many nurses speak disparagingly about free nursing CEUs as less than optimal training classes for new procedures or information pertinent to their practice as a nurse. True, some of the free CEU classes offered by our employers seemingly have nothing to do with the type of nursing we practice, but i...
Read more →The many possibilities for jobs in nursing can be overwhelming to the new graduate as well as the veteran nurse. I am constantly learning about nursing positions that I never knew existed. A professor once said “imagine any industry, any business and I’ll bet you can find a way to work a nursing job...
Read more →The recent economic woes have caused many professionals, including nurses, to delay retirement which in turn leads to an even greater risk of becoming burnt out in the profession. If we can recognize the warning signs of burnout, we can work towards bringing our life back into a healthy balance so t...
Read more →The current year-long economic recession took its toll on the nursing profession just like it did in all the other sectors of the economy. The Class of 2009 graduates of nursing schools, for example, are a bit disappointed to realize that it is now harder to land a top-paying job in many parts of th...
Read more →Editor: Today’s post is from a guest RN writing about her experiences in travel nursing. I have recently been considering a traveling nursing job. I love to travel and there are parts of the country that I have yet to see. I have known a few travel nurses, and they all say the same thing, “I love it...
Read more →We’ve all had them. The patient whose room we would avoid all shift if it were possible. The patient who, when receiving report from the off-going shift, made us groan. What I have found, however, is that frequently it takes a change in nursing staff to elicit a different response or different inter...
Read more →Editor’s Note: Today’s post is by a guest RN, if you’d like to write for our blog contact us. I don’t work in my community. I drive 25 miles to the northern end of another county to work as a cardiac nurse. I didn’t think about the location affecting my interaction with patients and other health car...
Read more →A sort of “us” vs. “them” mentality takes hold when nurses from these two different employment settings takes place. Each feels they have the better of both worlds, but is one setting really more desirable than the other? Some very important and some lighthearted benefits apply to both places: The h...
Read more →The permanent nursing position. The stuff that new grads dream of. But is the permanent position the one that will work best for you? A permanent nursing job brings steady work and steady pay with the option of full benefits. Holiday pay, medical benefits, vacation time add thousands of dollars wort...
Read more →Long hailed by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics as a nationwide crisis in the making, we are in the middle of a nursing shortage. Or are we? According to the latest stats of March 6, 2009, 27,000 new healthcare jobs were made available in February and 681,000 jobs, in general, were lost. Some of...
Read more →Many nurses seek employment with nurse staffing agencies as they have can more flexibility in how much they work and where they work. Many healthcare staffing agencies are the providers of choice for long-term care facilities when they are in a pinch during call-offs or as staff members leave their...
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