I have always said that if I were a little younger and single, I would love to have been a Travel Nurse. I became a nurse in my early thirties, and I had a fiancée and a wedding to plan. But what is a travel nurse? A Travel Nurse, considered a third-party contractor, finds contracts through the company and recruiter for nurses’ needs. The nurse then applies for the position, and the hospital picks out the best nurses for the unit.
The Money (standard and during the pandemic)
Travel Nurses do make more than core nursing staff. The amount of money during the 2020 year was highly bloated due to the pandemic. The news shared the pay of nurses receiving $11,000 a week offered to telemetry and ICU nurses in some California hospitals. The reports made it sound like they were throwing money at the nurse but let me break it down. They needed ICU nurses. The contract came with the expectatation to work five to six days a week 12-hour shifts. The crisis pays at this time asked the nurses to work more than the typical three days a week. This is not the regular pay for travel nurses, and these are crisis pay rates.
The travel opportunities
The travel opportunities for most companies include all 50 states. One travel nurse that came to my floor told me how they took a crisis job in Hawaii. The first two weeks of the contract, all the on-coming travel nurses quarantined for two weeks to make sure they weren’t sick. These two weeks were spent poolside at a resort that the hospital put the nurses up. In the past year, this nurse has also seen South Dakota, Maine, Texas, Arizona, and Hawaii. Some companies also staff nurses to the US territories, including Puerto Rico, US Virgin Islands, Guam, and Northern Marianna Islands. If you love to travel and see the United States, this gives you the opportunities to see different areas live in other regions for the eight-to-eleven-week contract.
The Experience
In the world of nursing, every hospital is a little different. The states also have a slightly different scope of practice for the nurse. One instance I have noticed from the three states I’ve worked in is calling the time-of-death. Connecticut nurses are unable to call time-of-death only a physician. In Texas, two RN can call death, and in Nevada, two RN can call if an order was put in before the patient passed. The experience between hospitals and states will give you a glimpse of what works better what’s worse and try a new way to do things.
Is travel nursing something that you’re interested in doing?