Nurses Taking Their Show on the Road

At a time many people feel lucky to have a steady job, thousands of nurses feel lucky not to have one. Known as traveling nurses, they have made a career and life out of working in staccato bursts - taking assignments of a few months each in different facilities across the country.

Traveling nurses often work full time, with little or no gap between jobs, but part-time work is also an option. Their assignments are usually arranged through an agency that acts as a combination employer and booking agent.

A typical agency puts nurses on its own payroll while they are on the job. Agencies pay nurses' salaries and often benefits including a portion of health insurance, and they help arrange housing on the road.

The agencies maintain relationships with hospitals and clinics, which count on them to ensure that the nurses they send have the right credentials and have had drug tests and requisite health checks and inoculations.

Demand from hospitals and clinics is strong enough for many full-time traveling nurses to make as much money as, or more than, they would in a conventional job, while being able to choose where they work. That is especially true for highly specialized segments of the profession, like those for intensive care, dialysis, emergency room and oncology.

"It's an attractive kind of career for a nurse who can do that moving around," said Marcia Faller, chief clinical officer at AMN Healthcare, a San Diego-based company that owns NursesRx, which employs 7,000 traveling nurses and other traveling health workers. When jobs end, she said, "they can extend their stay or move on to somewhere else."

The 20,000 or so traveling nurses working today enjoy some fringe benefits that other nurses do not. They often can avoid the bureaucracy and office politics that are part of many jobs. And serial assignments offer a chance for career development.

"They get an opportunity to work in hospitals that they wouldn't otherwise get a chance to work in, like Johns Hopkins or Stanford, and build a r?sum?," Ms. Faller said. "They can get that experience and bring it back home."

Travelers tend to be younger than other nurses, Ms. Faller said. But some, like Ms. Stubbs, who has a son in college, begin traveling later in their careers, after their children are old enough to fend for themselves.

Traveling nurses may fill in for regular staffers who are on vacation or maternity leave, or help meet seasonal demand for health care in popular holiday destinations.

As for more tangible benefits, it is hard to gauge how lucrative traveling nursing is, compared with the stationary kind. The straight hourly rate will almost certainly be higher, but part of the excess will be eaten by the costs of housing, airfare, rental cars and other necessities and comforts while on the road.

Source: NY Times, Conrad De Aenlle, 3/7/09