Travel Nurse Overview

[binggrad]

Can someone please give me an overview of what travel nursing is like? I'm entering nursing school this fall and I have heard people talk about eventually getting in to travel nursing. I understand that you are physically relocating to work at a new facility for a certain amount of time, but do people do this as a full time career? Or is travel nursing something to supplement your full time job with extra income?

[NedRN]

1. good

2. yes

3. no

[lindsey2384]

It has a lot of goods and bads. I was an LPN in nursing homes for 3 years, then an RN for 3 years on a CVIStepdown. You need really good solid experience. You need to be a strong nurse. You also need to be fairly independent as you are usually thrown onto a floor with very little orientation. Most people do it for the travel aspect, as the money isn't always a lot more than what you could make at home. Sometimes, and with experience and being choicy, you can make fairly good money. I'm currently working a med-tele floor in North Carolina and averaging about double my at home pay. But like I said, good and bad as with everything. Something to try, and if its not for you itll be over in 13 weeks lol, but I would be very hesistant to leave an amazing job with a lot of security to travel. Hope this helps!!

[dingoRN]

I am looking into travel nursing as well because I have 3 friends that are doing it. They are all in agreement about having at least 3 years of experience, even though most companies require only 1 year of experience. They work Med/Surg and that encompasses quite a large area of expertise. 2 of my 3 friends have had assignments where they have floated off their assigned unit almost half of the time to patient populations they were not very familiar with, so it is a good idea to get a lot of experience.

They all love travel nursing and are not looking to get rich, but a lot of the good paying jobs are in Oregon/California/New York. It really all depends on your recruiter. One of my friends had to leave an agency that the other friend was at because her recruiter sucked, but the other friend's recruiter was awesome. So it is a crap shoot for which agency is really the best.

One friend wants to do travel nursing for another 5-6 years, but the other two just want to do it for another year. They all basically said that travel nursing is like being the new kid with every contract and this can be either exciting or terrifying depending on the nurses attitude.

A good idea of a gauge of pay is to check out a few different agencies to see what pay packages are like for one specific area (like Northern California or a specific city) and then go from there. Sometimes it can be a huge difference from one company to the next.