Nursing Wiki

Getting Started in Travel Nursing

Travel nursing asks for one thing before anything else: enough experience to walk onto an unfamiliar unit and carry a full patient load with a short orientation. Everything after that is paperwork and judgement.

What agencies require

Most agencies want at least one year of recent experience in the specialty being placed, and many facilities want more. The reason is not gatekeeping. A traveller often gets a few shifts of orientation and is then expected to function, which is a different job from being a new graduate on a unit with a preceptor and an assigned mentor.

Recency matters as much as length. A nurse whose intensive care experience is six years old is, for these purposes, not an intensive care nurse. Nurses moving specialties usually do it in a staff post first.

Which specialties the contracts are in

Travel demand is concentrated in a handful of areas. Across NurseRecruiter's full archive of travel postings, medical-surgical accounted for about 18 percent, telemetry and step-down 15 percent, emergency 12 percent, intensive care 11 percent, the operating room 9 percent and labour and delivery 6 percent. Catheterisation laboratory, dialysis, home health, surgical technologists and post-anaesthesia care follow.

That list is close to the list of units hospitals cannot keep staffed. Turnover runs highest in behavioural health at 22.5 percent, emergency at 20.7, telemetry at 19.5 and step-down at 19.0, against 13.4 percent in paediatrics, and telemetry posts take the longest to fill at 87 days. A nurse with experience in one of those areas will see more contracts, sooner, because the alternative for the hospital is the vacancy it already has. See nursing specialties.

What to prepare before contacting anyone

A résumé written for this purpose. Not a list of duties, but the facts a facility uses to judge whether you can be dropped into their unit: facility type and bed count, unit type and bed count, typical patient ratios, patient population and acuity, the electronic record system used, equipment and drips you are independent with, and charge, precepting or triage experience.

References. Usually two, from supervisors, from within a recent period, with current contact details. Ask them before listing them.

Certifications, current, with expiry dates you know.

Immunisation records, titers and screening results. These take longer to assemble than anything else and are the usual reason a start date slips. See licensing a travel assignment.

Reaching agencies without being buried

The common first experience is a single enquiry producing months of calls from firms the nurse never contacted. The fix is to control who receives the profile rather than broadcasting it: on this site a nurse completes one profile, sees which agencies want to receive it, and can remove any of them before anything is sent. Travel nursing jobs and the profile flow are described in how to become a travel nurse.

Working with more than one agency is normal. What is not safe is giving open permission to submit; two agencies presenting the same nurse for the same job usually results in the facility rejecting the profile outright. Authorise each submission for a named facility. See agencies and recruiters.

Choosing a first assignment

Three considerations outrank the rate on a first contract.

A compact state is faster. If your licence is multistate, an assignment in another compact state removes an application, a fee and a wait of unknown length. Seven in ten travel postings are in compact states, so this rules out less than it sounds like.

A facility that trains travellers is worth more than a marginally higher rate. Ask what orientation is, how many shifts, and what units the contract permits floating to.

Somewhere you would tolerate for three months. The rate is fixed; the three months are not.

Be aware that the places nurses ask for and the places with the work are close to opposite. Requests cluster on Florida, California, Texas, North Carolina and Hawaii; assignments per employed nurse cluster on Idaho, Alaska, New Mexico, Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire and Montana. Not one of the ten most requested states is in the top fifteen by assignments per nurse. Being willing to go where fewer people want to go is the single largest piece of leverage a traveller has. See where the assignments are.

Money before the first contract

A travel year is not 52 paid weeks. Gaps between assignments, licensing waits and travel days are unpaid, and a first contract can start later than promised.

Before starting, have a cushion covering deposits and first month's rent if you are taking a stipend rather than agency housing, travel to the assignment before any reimbursement arrives, several weeks without income if a start date moves or an assignment is cancelled, and health cover for any gap before agency benefits begin.

The first two weeks

Orientation is short. Expect to ask where things are kept and to be the newest person in every conversation, repeatedly, for the length of your career as a traveller. Nurses who do well at it are the ones who ask early rather than guess.

Read the contract again on arrival, particularly the float clause and the guaranteed hours. Both become relevant in the first fortnight more often than at any other point. See travel nursing contracts.

Deciding whether it is worth it

On money, travel work now pays better than staff work by an ordinary margin rather than a spectacular one, once unpaid weeks and benefits are counted. On everything else it pays what it always did: choosing where you live for a season, leaving a bad unit at thirteen weeks instead of three years, and seeing how a dozen hospitals actually work.

One finding is worth carrying in with you. When researchers profiled the travel workforce against staff nurses, intent to leave nursing among travellers was high and, unusually, no lower among the youngest of them than among the oldest, at around 35 percent in both groups. Travel work is often taken as an escape from a burnout-inducing job, and the arrangement itself carries a version of the same load: no team, no orientation to speak of, and the heaviest assignments on a strange unit.

Nurses who started during the 2021 boom because the money was extraordinary are doing a different job now, and reassessing is reasonable. Nurses starting for the other reasons are getting what they came for. See travel nurse pay packages and nurse burnout.

Sources

Find your next nursing job here

100% free for nurses. New jobs every day. Travel, per-diem, and permanent positions nationwide.

See something out of date? Sign in to suggest an edit.