Recommended experience for first time travel assignment.

Specialties Travel

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Hello! I was hoping to get some advice from some more experienced nurses. I am currently working on a med surg floor for about 5 months. Previously I was working at a "skilled nursing" facility in a sub acute rehab for two years. This is my first med surg job, and other than clinicals it's the only hospital experience I have. I have been in touch with a recruiter for a travel Nurse agency for a little over a year, and she has patiently been keeping up with me while I've gone from sub acute to med surg and completed my BSN. We are talking now to start looking for my first travel assignment in the next few months, but I was hoping for some advice on whether or not it is too soon to start traveling. Some people say I should stay for one full year where I am now, a few say two years. I desperately want to start travel nursing, and I am feeling much more confident in my med surg abilities. I also would feel bad for making my recruiter wait another few months for me to take an assignment with her (which is silly I know).

I just dont want my desire to start this new journey as aoon as I can as well as the eagerness from my recruiter to put me in a situation where I might be in over my head or out of my league since I am still pretty new to the field. If anyone has any advice I would greatly appreciate it! Thank you.

-Sam

Have you explored any of the facebook groups that are out there for travel nursing? You can get a lot of good advice and recommendations there, as well as here. Good luck to you.

It just seems rude to me to suggest publicly that someone should take their nursing discussion somewhere else. Seems like good advice is easily found here and in a user friendly format. Some advice? PM such comments.

No offense, I like your posts generally.

It just seems rude to me to suggest publicly that someone should take their nursing discussion somewhere else. Seems like good advice is easily found here and in a user friendly format. Some advice? PM such comments.

No offense, I like your posts generally.

So as long as there is some information here other resources shouldn't be suggested for exploration; because that's what you're saying. That is the entire point that forums exist, to exchange information.

Why didn't you PM your comment instead of posting it for everyone to see since you feel that is the only appropriate method of making suggestions?

Specializes in ICU, trauma.

i've been an ICU nurse coming up a year...and i couldn't imagine traveling :eek:

We get a lot of travelers and i absolutely love them because they are generally super experienced and can answer a lot of my questions.

So others can model appropriate etiquette.

I mention lots of resources in my posts. I don't tell anyone to take a nursing discussion somewhere else, and certainly not to a competitor of the venue I'm posting on. Can you not see how rude that is? You can not even point to a lack of helpful replies here to look somewhere else for help.

Specializes in Pediatric Critical Care.
It just seems rude to me to suggest publicly that someone should take their nursing discussion somewhere else. Seems like good advice is easily found here and in a user friendly format. Some advice? PM such comments.

No offense, I like your posts generally.

I like your posts generally, too. :up: And no offense taken!

I did say that there are good resources both here AND elsewhere. It's just another resource that I have often found helpful. I wouldn't consider it a competitor, just another great resource that has many active users when it comes to the subject of travel nursing. You will get great responses here (often from you), but you can get dozens of great replies in those other places, too. Both are valuable. Besides, when one is considering a career move like that, there is no such thing as too much information. I don't consider it rude, personally, but I can understand your point of view. I certainly did not mean to imply that discussion SHOULDN'T happen here, but that there are ALSO other great places to get additional information.

It just seems rude to me to suggest publicly that someone should take their nursing discussion somewhere else. Seems like good advice is easily found here and in a user friendly format. Some advice? PM such comments.

No offense, I like your posts generally.

It's not rude, at all. Not even remotely.

I like your posts generally, too. And no offense taken!

I did say that there are good resources both here AND elsewhere. It's just another resource that I have often found helpful. I wouldn't consider it a competitor, just another great resource that has many active users when it comes to the subject of travel nursing.

What I implied but did not say is that Allnurses is for-profit and depends on advertising revenue (page views reading forums) and member subscriptions for survival. They have an official policy of not allowing links to competitors (which is almost everyone in their view, both before and after Brian Short's tenure). I'm especially sensitive to this as I was once banned for three years here for posting links (to non-profits) in two messages to information directly related to a member's request (inside of around an hour - about five hours later I received a warning, and then a few minutes later I received a message saying I was banned).

While I don't agree with Allnurses policy (and learned that I can post suggestions on how to search for specific information rather than linking directly as a workaround), I still don't believe in a thread as effective as this one in posting requested advice to the OP to look elsewhere is polite or needed. It is akin to a Chevy fan posting comments about how much better Chevys are on a Ford forum. That might be a bad example as such trolling behavior is commonplace with no attempt to be helpful as was your intent.

I only suggest other forums for posts about (for example) RVs. Specialized forums exist for every imaginable topic and when it is not directly nursing related, there is a lot more to be learned about (for example) "full timing" in an RV on a specialized forum with many thousands of relevant posts from equipment to parks or "boon docking" or managing mail or residence status versus the usual three or four posts to such a query here.

I also admit to not being a FB fan. Information there is free form, and cannot be discovered and archived like regular forums (not a persistent resource). In my time looking at FB travel nursing pages, information (just like here) is about as likely to be harmful and misleading as useful. The difference is that correcting misinformation on a forum is relatively easy, on FB, almost impossible as we learned during this last election. FB is a very compelling platform and much of the decline of forums such as this is due to their members basically doing most of their communication there in all aspects of their life. Nothing wrong with that, just an observation on the traffic decline of most forums in recent years. I did find a very lucrative assignment through a FB post, pretty random though - just saying I did get some travel nursing value from FB.

Anyway, talking about thread drift!

Specializes in CCU, SICU, CVSICU, Precepting & Teaching.
I know Rn's with less experience than you who traveled and were successful. If they can do it , you can. Some need 1 of 2 years to be ready if you feel confident just do it

This is particularly bad advice.

Confidence is not a good measure of competence. You need 2-3 years in your specialty before you travel. Some companies will accept you with one year, but that's to your detriment.

Specializes in CCU, SICU, CVSICU, Precepting & Teaching.
So others can model appropriate etiquette.

I mention lots of resources in my posts. I don't tell anyone to take a nursing discussion somewhere else, and certainly not to a competitor of the venue I'm posting on. Can you not see how rude that is? You can not even point to a lack of helpful replies here to look somewhere else for help.

So others can model appropriate etiquette? You're kidding, right? It is not rude to suggest additional routes for research, even if that suggestion is FaceBook. The only rudeness I saw was your response. Your etiquette is not such as should be modeled.

Most travel companies want two years of acute inpatient experience. I would get that if I were you. I would also take advantages of floating at your current workplace if this is available to you. It helps get you in the mindset of travel nursing. Travel nurses often get the toughest and most taxing assignments - the shift change admission and the extra patient. They are often floated to other areas of the hospita to fill those needs. You do have to learn new things as you travel, however, your travel host does not want to hear "Show me how to do this" on the regular. If you wait 2 years you will be in much better shape than if you only have 5 months of hospital experience.

Specializes in Pediatric Critical Care.
I would also take advantages of floating at your current workplace if this is available to you. It helps get you in the mindset of travel nursing.

Great advice. I would say that is what helped to prepare me the most for traveling - I worked a float team position where I often would move to a different floor every 4 or 8 hours. You get used to a lot that way!

Specializes in CVICU.
It just seems rude to me to suggest publicly that someone should take their nursing discussion somewhere else. Seems like good advice is easily found here and in a user friendly format. Some advice? PM such comments.

No offense, I like your posts generally.

She is not telling her to take the discussion elsewhere, she is giving her additional places to get feedback. The Facebook groups that I am a part of have over 20,000 members. You get at least 5-10 responses within the first hour of posting something, and the discussion can be had in real time with notifications when there is a response. The same cannot be said for here but again she did not say to disregard this forum altogether, just to add other avenues of research to her repertoire.

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