Travel Nursing: How to Decide if this is the Career For You

Although most medical centers don't like to admit it, there will always be a need for travel nurses, or nurses who accept short-term assignments to help hospitals and clinics meet staffing needs. Travel nurses carry with them an area of expertise that allow sthem to go from hospital to hospital with minimal nursing training and are expected to complete a normal six-week orientation within a very short time frame, usually within one to three shifts. Travel assignments generally range from one to thirteen weeks, although thirteen weeks is more of the norm. Typically, a department in the hospital will hire travel nurses while new core staff is still on orientation or when experienced core staff is on maternity leave.

In order to fill the needs prospective hospitals have, a travel nurse candidate must have at least 6 months to one year of experience in a specialty area. Continuing education in that area of expertise is highly recommended because it makes the candidate more desirable to the prospective hospital, but technically is not necessary.

If you're looking into travel nursing and wondering if it will fit your lifestyle, consider where you will travel. Are you married with children? Or are you single and unattached? Do you volunteer within your community? Or are you commitment free?

The good news is that travel nursing can fit within both lifestyles. If you need to be home to fill obligations with children and family, you can travel within 2 hours of home. Many hospitals will allow travel nurses to cluster their shifts so the traveler works three twelve-hour shifts, then is off for four days, minimizing days away from home. This lifestyle does force you to become very organized so you can maximize your effectiveness as a nurse and as a wife and mother or husband and father. You still get to go to your child's sporting events, recitals, plays and parent-teacher conferences, but planning in advance is a MUST. You have to be able to arrange your schedule weeks in advance to ensure enough travel time between events. It can get pretty hairy sometimes, but it can be done.

And, if you have a senior in high school who is planning to go out of state to start college, you can always arrange a travel assignment near your child's college or university so they can transition into being away from home while you're still nearby. Travel nursing also allows you the opportunity to live and work near out-of-state family so you can be around for pregnancies, childbirth, or, sadly, attend to end-of-life issues with aging relatives.

If you are single and don't mind being away from your primary residence for three months at a time, you can travel further away. Many agencies own townhouses, apartments or homes in larger cities where they consistently place travelers. If agency-owned housing is unavailable, you will be paid a tax-free travel stipend to pay for your own accommodations.

Even the single parent can be a travel nurse. If you perform well, oftentimes you'll be asked to extend your assignment anywhere from 4-13 weeks. This means that you can remain in the same place for six months. Some travel nurses stay with the same hospital for a year or more as travelers by renewing contracts. This enables your child or children to remain in the same school system for one to two semesters at a time. However, be aware that the lower elementary grades are easier to transition mid-year than upper grades. Upper grades tend to have second semesters that build on first semester information, especially in the areas of history, science and math. Moving middle-schoolers and teens is more difficult than moving first through fourth graders.

Single parent travel nurses must plan for things like day care prior to moving to a new city. This can be rather intimidating because you don't get the opportunity to interview day care providers face-to-face like you normally would. However, much of the planning any traveler needs can be done over the Internet.

Family support is invaluable to the single-parent travel nurse. If you can travel near your children's grandparents or aunts and uncles, they can provide a sense of family and stability to your nomadic lifestyle.

Wages for the traveler are usually 40-50% higher than core staff wages and many agencies offer free health, life, vision and dental insurance for travelers and reduced-price insurance for their families. Average take-home pay, including travel stipend, is around $1,200-$1,500 weekly.

A few things you should know before taking the plunge: each facility in which you accept an assignment is required to provide you with mandatory training as it would all of it's employees if it wishes to maintain it's JCAHO accreditation. This means that with each new hospital comes a new round of OSHA training, security training, medication tests and competencies. Essentially, you're maintaining your annual competencies every three months.

Since each assignment typically lasts only 13 weeks, that adds an air of uncertainty about what you'll be doing in three months, six months or next year. Sometimes, you won't know where your next assignment will be a week or two before it starts. And, your first year of travel nursing, if you don't work, you don't get paid.

Many agencies have stringent rules on sick time as well. For instance, many companies will deduct the missed day's wages from your paycheck unless you can make the day up later in the same pay week. Others will just deduct the missed day's wages. Also, if you don't like your assignment and decide to terminate your contract early, you can end up with some pretty hefty penalties from your travel agency to the tune of $2,000-$5,000.

That is not to say that you do not have recourse in the instance of hostile work environment or harassment. Most contracts include an "out" clause for those instances and if your first contract does not contain that clause, get it rewritten and put it in there. Although the function of the travel nurse is to help hospitals with staffing needs and get them "over the hump", it's not unheard of for core staff to be prejudiced against travel nurses. Some travel nurses report being forced into taking heavier patient loads then they feel comfortable with solely because they are travelers.

And bear in mind that travel nursing really is more nursing than travel. When you are on a travel assignment, you are not on vacation. You're working. And since you're a travel nurse, you're naturally held to a higher standard than core staff nurses. No matter where you are currently working, you represent your travel company anytime you are on hospital grounds, whether on the clock or off.

So, if you have what it takes to be an example to other nurses, if you have the expertise, if you have the experience and are able to work well during staffing crunches, you have what it takes to travel. If you do the math and find out that you spend more hours with your kids by traveling rather than having to take call all the time as core staff, traveling may be right for you. If you can adapt well to different environments and can learn new charting systems fairly easily, you'll have an easier time as a travel nurse. And if you don't mind saying goodbye every three months to a new set of friends and coworkers, you can be a travel nurse.