Everything travel nurses need to know about travel nursing jobs, including how to find them and what to expect while working them.
Many travel nurses wonder if they should work with more than one travel nursing agency to help them land their desired job. The simple answer is yes! In this article, we’ll review everything travel nurses need to know about working with multiple agencies.
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It’s useful for travel nurses to be informed about hospital-agency relationships. Remember, a travel nursing company can only work with a hospital if it has a contract to do so. These contracts exist under several different arrangements. Each arrangement results in different outcomes for the hospital, the agency, and the travel nurse. There are essentially two relationship categories, Direct Relationships and Vendor Management Service relationships. Read more
A travel nursing company must have a contract with a facility in order to send travel nurses to work there. Contract provisions differ from contract to contract. However, it is standard for the contracts to contain a common set of provisions. These provisions include things like the bill rate, solicitation clauses, liability insurance requirements, contract termination rules, shift guarantee and cancellation policies, compliance and record management policies, billing and collection policies, and a host of others. Some of these provisions have a direct impact on the travel nurse.
Supplemental staffing plays a large role in ensuring that hospitals and other healthcare providers remain adequately staffed at all times. There are essentially 4 main types of supplemental healthcare staffing: PRN, Seasonal, Locum/Travel Contracts, and Local Contracts. The type of supplemental staffing that hospitals and healthcare providers choose to utilize depends on the particular circumstances they’re faced with. Read more
Traveling healthcare professionals have been around in some form or another as long as there have been people with a passion and desire to care for the health and well being of others. However, this blog is focused on the modern supplemental healthcare staffing industry in the United States. Depending on how you define the beginning, it seems fairly typical to place the genesis of this now massive industry sometime in either the 1970s, or 1980s. Read more
Travel nursing documentation is one of the biggest burdens that travel nurses have to contend with when landing a new travel nursing job. When I first started as a recruiter in 2006, it was standard to provide the facility with nothing more than copies of the nurse’s licenses, certifications, basic medical records, and a unit test. Now, every facility seems to have its own packet of facility specific documentation, testing, and orientation information that must be completed prior to starting a assignment. Read more
Maintaining your professional references is extremely important when seeking travel nursing jobs. It will also be important when transitioning back to permanent employment. Every facility has its own requirements regarding references. The standard requirement for travel jobs is: 2 supervisory clinical references covering 1 year within the previous three years in the specialty applied for.
I’ve learned first hand that the best facilities have the most stringent requirements. Some facilities will not accept a travel nurse candidate without a reference from the candidate’s most recent Unit Manager. Solid references can be the differentiating factor in determining which candidate lands the travel job, or permanent nursing job. The problem is that while facilities require references, they also prohibit their employees from providing them. Read more
