Everything you need to know about travel nursing including finding travel nursing companies, negotiating pay, taxes, travel nursing jobs, and more.
In our previous post, we discussed how to differentiate travel nursing companies by their size. In this post, we’re going to discuss how the size of a travel nursing company can potentially affect the service travel nurses receive from them. Read more
There are hundreds travel nursing companies and there are over a thousand healthcare staffing companies engaged in PRN, Locum Tenens, travel nursing, and travel allied combined. In a general sense, they all operate the same exact way. They have contracts with hospitals. They send their healthcare staff to the hospitals. They bill the hospitals for their staff’s time. They keep a cut of the money they collect and they pay their staff the difference. However, there are differences between agencies that can have an impact on travel nurses. In this post, we’ll describe our preferred method for categorizing agencies.
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.
Travel nursing companies are at the center of the healthcare staffing industry. They act as the “middle men” between the healthcare provider and the travel nurse. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of healthcare staffing agencies that are engaged in travel nursing contracts or PRN in the United States. Unlike “middle men” in many other industries, travel nursing companies provide an invaluable service that cannot be easily removed. There are some hospitals that attempt to cut out the middle man but such examples are few and far between, and typically require a unique set of circumstances. Read more
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
