Finally making the jump to travel nursing

[pnwRN88]

I have been a nurse for about three years. 1.5 in Med-tele and 1.5 in PCU. I work in a small community hospital, 27 PCU beds, no cath lab in hospital so we don't have post cath patients, we ship out patients with STEMI to a higher level care. 

Being a small hospital we don't have specialty teams.  PCU and CCU which we work closely with respond to code stroke, code blue and rapid response.  

With all that being said I want to jump into the travel nursing world. I just don't know if I should target med-tele or PCU. I don't want to backtrack into med-tele but also don't want to be incompetent in a big hospital PCU.... help.

[NedRN]

PCUs are different in every hospital. You are well qualified for tele, and for PCU, will depend on hospital. You won't get assignments (hopefully) that you cannot do safely. Besides what a recruiter might know of the clinical conditions, the account rep is also going to scrutinize your profile carefully before submission (which includes a skills checklist you filled out), as will the hospital HR (or their substitute HR vendor manager). On top of that, for most assignments, you will also have the opportunity to interview the unit nurse manager. Mostly at this point, the hospital already knows they want you, but it is your chance to ask about the patient population and skills needed. And workflow, patient ratios, support staff, floating and so on. You may not even know what questions are important to you until you have done a few assignments.