Providing health care lets you nurse an urge to roam

I’ve been asking people who know me whether I’d make a good nurse -- a traveling nurse, that is. This wanderlust-indulging profession allows qualified RNs to take temporary work (usually 13 weeks at a time) in different, attractive parts of the country. When the gig is up, they go someplace else.

Cindy Abernathy, a former traveling nurse I met in December on a Rhine River cruise, lived in 20 places in six years, from Fort Lauderdale, Fla., to Cape Cod, Mass., to Reno and a ski resort in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania. Now she’s settled down in Virginia Beach, Va., to start a business. But she misses the traveling nurse lifestyle and fondly remembers that in the old days she rarely left her apartment without taking her camera.

Dorothy Del Valle, who is also a traveling nurse, said a couple of years ago, “I’ve always had a little of the nomad in me.” In 2000 she spent 3 1/2 months working at a hospital in Fairbanks, Alaska. She took her mother along and visited Mt. McKinley, the Arctic Circle and the Yukon River. “You could never fit all we did in a week’s vacation.”

The pay and benefits for qualified registered nurses are almost as good as the travel: $20 to $25 an hour, with medical insurance, a transportation allowance, furnished accommodations, reimbursement for state licensing fees, occasional bonuses for contract extensions and whatever other benefits a nurse can negotiate (all paid for by the agencies that place them, which, in turn, charge hospitals as much as $65 an hour for the temporary health-care workers they provide). Abernathy knows a traveler who persuaded her placement company to pay for the 300-thread-count sheets she wanted.

Health-care professionals are in demand because of the U.S. nursing shortage. This year there are 136,000 unfilled nursing positions in the U.S.; that figure is expected to increase to 808,000 by 2020, according to a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services study released last July. The same survey projected that California alone would need 121,000 more nurses by 2020.

Nancy Widener, vice president of the Travel Nurse Network, a placement company in Fort Lauderdale, says the shortage started about a decade ago, when nurses began leaving the field because “hospitals used to treat them so badly and pay so poorly.” The sheer numbers of aging baby boomers who need medical treatment contributed to the shortage, and the snowbird retirement lifestyle resulted in heightened seasonal demand for nurses willing to travel, especially to Sun Belt states.

Now the use of nurses for temporary assignments, both near and far from home, is widespread, even though their salaries are typically higher than those of staff nurses. Alice Haas, workforce manager for Kaiser Permanente in California, says the HMO’s hospitals use many traveling nurses, especially to augment staffing in times of peak demand, such as winter flu season. For Kaiser, it’s not as uneconomical as it might sound. “We pay a little more money for traveling nurses’ 13-week contracts, but we don’t have to carry the cost of benefits,” Haas says.

Jeri Lynn Kirschner, marketing director for First Assist Inc., a Bethesda, Md., nurse placement company, thinks that traveling helps prevent burnout among nurses, who typically work three grueling 12-hour shifts a week (leaving them four days free for rest and recreation). “It’s a way to keep nurses in the profession,” Kirschner says. “We want to do anything we can to keep them on the job.”

All kinds of people are attracted to travel nursing, it seems. “It’s not necessarily just young singles,” Kirschner says. “We have lots of empty-nesters and RVers.” She knows nurses with children who take assignments in Southern California during the summer, giving the kids a chance to visit Disneyland. Others find jobs near far-flung family members to reestablish ties.

Operating room nurse Del Valle has a permanent residence in Lorain, Ohio, occupied by her daughter’s family; when it’s time to take a vacation, she goes home to see them.

Abernathy, who became a nurse specifically to see the country, says the lifestyle toughened her up to travel on her own. Unafraid, she has ventured widely. “I had a really good set of years there. After Reno, I got in a car and drove down Highway 1 to L.A., where I caught a Mexican Riviera cruise before my next job in Victorville, Calif.”

There are drawbacks, of course, including loneliness, hostility from staff nurses who know that temps make more than they do and the need to keep getting used to new places. “Sometimes the scariest thing is starting a new job, and it doesn’t get easier,” Abernathy says.

Because hospitals can’t always foresee staffing needs, traveling nurses also can’t always plan far into the future. They may want an Arizona job in the winter but find a spot only in Kansas. Kaiser Permanente’s Haas says they must be flexible even when it comes to being moved from unit to unit during the same shift. They must be able to adjust to new settings quickly and, of course, have the skills, which might include a knowledge of a variety of patient charting systems.

I can’t stand the sight of blood, so it’s probably best for me to stay in my current job. But it’s good to know there’s another paying profession for people who love to travel.