Travel nurse vs. staff nurse

[Shera0830]

Please help need advice. I am a new travel nurse and I am realizing that it's not all glits and glam. I am finishing my first assignment and am now looking for my next I am a med/surg RN and was told by my recuiter that if I was willing to go anywhere that I could keep working year around. I am finding that to be untrue, well in a state of panic I went on a local hospital website and appiled for an OR job and got it. But now I am torn do I continue to travel or do I take the OR position. I know these positions are hard to come by and it will help pad my resume for the future and may help me be a hotter canidate for traveling later. Need advice on what you would do please help.

[RNERHOUSESUPOR]

You need to do what will make you happy. If you are unhappy and stressed out by not knowing about your next job then taking a staff position may be better for you . If you get tired of the local politics of the work place too quickly then moving as a travel nurse may be better. You will need at least a year in the OR to start traveling again and use that as your specialty. Congrats on the new job offer.

Rod

[llg, PhD, RN]

In this economy, travelling is going to "iffy" for a while -- particularly if you can only work general med/surg. Not that there is anything "only" about med/surg -- just that there are so many nurses looking for jobs, few hospitals want to spend the extra money on a traveler when they can hire a local resident on a PRN basis dirt cheap. Nurses in the "hard-to-fill" specialties that require extra training are the ones more likely to be hired as travelers.

Why not use this time to get experience in a specialty (such as OR) that will open up a lot more opportunities for you as a traveler later? If you find that you like the OR job, you can stay there forever. But once you get competent and fulfill any obligations you may have to the hospital that trained you, you will be able to look for travel assignments in either med/surg or OR.

It sounds like the med/surg traveler option isn't working out to be as good as you imaginied. Why not open up another possibility? You don't have to keep the OR job forever.

[flnursemichelle]

I too have just started my travel nurisng assignments. I am on my second one and it is a local contract. I too have often wondered how it would be to get a next assignment. I ended one assignment on friday, and started doing interviews that day and I got an offer for a monday start on friday afternoon. Luckily it was very close to where I was, so I only had to move my stuff a 3 hour drive. The trick in this type of work is to not stress about it, something will come up. I knew my end date at my first assignment and was starting to get stressed because it was 3-4 weeks til the end and I had no clue where I was going next but all the people who called to interview me wanted me to start next day or so. When it got closer to the end of my assignment, I started worrying but I didn't even have a chance to relax in between assignments. The major lesson I learned is that you can't stress about the next assignment because it will come. If you start too early, they aren't willing to wait for you to end if they have someone right away. They seemed to want people who could start right away. I found that when it got closer to the start of their needs, that is when they work to find someone. If you are flexible to where you go and what type of work you do you have more options.