Travel nursing may be the hottest trend to hit the nursing profession in decades. While there have always been opportunities for skilled nurses to take positions on cruise ships and at luxury resorts, travel nursing has taken on a new meaning with the critical shortage of nurses nationwide. These days, your nursing diploma can net you a career that allows you to hit the ski slopes in Vail in March, take a month-long cruise of the Alaskan coast in July and spend January on the beach in Miami - all while getting paid for it. The question remains: is travel nursing the right career move for you?
1. Do you enjoy variety in your life and your career?
2. Do you enjoy new experiences?
3. Are you happiest when learning about new people and places?
4. Can you easily transition into new experiences?
5. Are you a nurse or thinking of becoming one?
If you answered yes to the questions above, you just may find that travel nursing is the perfect career move for you.
Why Travel Nursing Is So Hot With the nursing shortage hitting the nation hard, medical facilities have become very creative in finding ways to fill their open positions. In many situations, hospitals, nursing facilities and clinics are trying to fill both temporary and permanent positions in markets that are already stretched to their capacity trying to maintain minimum staffing levels. One solution that has worked well is "travel nursing". This is a situation where a staffing agency helps place credentialed nurses who are willing to temporarily relocate to hospitals that need their skills. Those hospitals are often located in some of the nation's most popular tourist destinations and metropolitan areas.
What's Great about Travel Nursing As if the opportunity to work in some of the world's most popular destinations is not enough, there are many other advantages to travel nursing. Here's what you can expect when you sign up with a placement agency as a traveling nursing professional:
-Generous pay and travel stipends While the hourly and per diem rate varies depending on the particular location and agency with which you sign on, you can expect a guarantee of 36-40 work weeks with hourly rates as high as $48.
-Housing or housing allowance provided Most agencies provide housing in a private one bedroom apartment, with the basic utilities paid as long as you are in your assignment. If you choose to find your own apartment rather than accept the one that is provided, the agency will add a generous housing allowance to your pay package. The only residential and housing expenses will be for amenities like telephone, internet access and cable television.
-Insurance The placement agencies work hard to make these positions exceptionally attractive. Your pay package will nearly always include fully paid health and dental insurance that will cover you in any part of the country. Many will also offer you a chance to purchase life insurance at low rates.
-Free travel All travel between your home base and your assignments will be fully paid, and usually completely tax free. Since the travel is part of your work requirement, you'll also be traveling tax free.
-Variety of assignments all over the country The many types of nursing assignments which you will have access to will give your resume an incredible boost. Thousands of medical facilities throughout the country regularly use travel nurses to fill their empty positions. Generally, your assignments will run either 13 or 26 weeks, and you can often extend your assignment for more than one period. As a traveling nurse, you will have your pick of positions in every type of nursing facility from busy emergency and trauma centers to chronic care retirement communities to renowned research centers. You will have your choice of locations as well, whether you prefer big city lights or quiet country nights or something in between, the placement agencies are almost certain to be able to place you in your ideal temporary job.
-Take Time When You Want Time Your work schedule can be as flexible as you want it to be. Since you choose the assignments that you will take, you can choose to take time off between assignments, or decide to take an assignment close to home if you need to be near family. Travel nursing is the logical extension of temp staffing - you can work where you are needed, when you are needed and take time off when you want it.
-Advance your Career Travel nursing gives you unlimited opportunities to add to your professional experience and resume. You can deliberately take assignments that concentrate on areas where you want to add experience. Spend six months in a major teaching hospital to increase your experience in surgical nursing, and then take on three months as a temp nurse in a pediatrics rotation in a busy city trauma center. Working on a nurse midwife's degree? Take an assignment in maternity at a hospital or birthing center that offers the latest in birthing methods, then spend six months in a rural clinic where you'll be responsible for nearly all routine health care to gain experience in office management.
If you enjoy travel, variety and flexibility, a travel nursing job may be ideal for you.
When we shifted into our new house in Melbourne at the end of 2005 I was pretty excited as what I had to start with was a clean slate which meant careful planning and the opportunity to fill my new garden with all the types of plants that I really loved. For me Australian native plants were one of my passions as well as the protea family from South Africa. Basically, any member of the proteaceae family are the plants that I love the most.
The plan with the backyard was to excavate an area in the middle with the intention of having a sunken lawn with raised garden beds about 3m wide in between the lawn and the fence. The idea had always appealed to me as I like to add a little bit of interest in the way things are landscaped.
Firstly the excavations from the lawn area were removed and then piled around the fence area for the raised garden beds. This would be ideal as most proteaceae plants like good drainage and friable soil so the raised beds would be ideal. The only problem was, that excavations were hard dry brown clay. This was about as unsuitable as you could get for these types of plants.
Now the easy way out of this would have been to get the clay carted away and then get lots and lots of garden soil or even sandy loam in to replace it with. Not only would this be very expensive and time consuming but it also meant that I'd be dumping my rubbish somewhere else and replacing it with somebody elses (in this case the environments) good quality soil.
The only option for me was to improve what I already had and turn it into something that the plants would be very happy to grow in. Not only was this very achievable but it would also mean less work for me, money saved and better for the environment. The plan was simple, get some gypsum and lots of good quality compost delivered, hire as large a cultivator that I thought I could hang onto and then just cultivate it all in together.
It was all very simple but the success of the whole project was to hinge on just one small factor.......... getting the right compost. Now because the majority of the plants that were to go in my garden were proteaceae I knew that the compost had to be free of any phosphorus. This was important because as most gardeners know fertilizers with phosphorus will kill most plants from this family.
When I went to the garden center and inquired about the phosphorus I was told that they couldn't guarantee the compost didn't have phosphorus and they suggested that I use Eucy mulch. This consisted of shredded leaves and branches from Eucalyptus trees. This to me didn't seem like a good option at all as the mulch was far from being compost and was not suitable to bury under the ground as it was still going through the composting process. Neither of these options were suitable so I decided try another garden center. The next one I went to also had compost. I asked about the phosphorus and despite the sales person being unsure he did assure me that it was suitable for natives and there shouldn't be any problems.
I suppose I should have been skeptical at this response but the compost was very good quality and it was also the right price. At the end of the day I thought it was worth the risk as there weren't really many other options. So based on all of that the project went ahead and by September of 2006 my garden beds were ready to be planted out with all my favorite plants.
The summer that followed was very dry and I kept my garden alive by hand watering and some of the plants actually started to grow. But by the time autumn started to roll around some of these also started to die. All of a sudden I started to get a bad feeling about what was happening. Most of the plants that were dying were proteaceae plants and the ones that were doing ok were mostly not. I was starting to accept that my worst fear was now starting to become a reality. There was some phosphorus in the compost. This was the worst outcome possible for me. This garden I was building was to be a place for me to show case the types of plants that I loved the most and to top it all off some of the plants that had perished were actually very rare and rarely seen in gardens and plant nurseries.
Anyway as time went on more and more plants slowly started to pass away and I replaced them with non proteaceae plants. But as time went on I also discovered something else. Not all of the proteaceae plants were actually dying. Some were actually doing ok. All of a sudden my mood went from despair and perseverance to relising there was an opportunity here to actually learn something.
All of a sudden I could start to document which proteaceae plants aren't affected by phosphorus, which one's will barely tolerant it and which ones were killed by it. What the experts had been saying for years was not 100 of their leaves were either partially or completely blacken by the phosphorus. These would be the subjects of my experiment. I then drenched them with the liquid fertilizer solution and continued to do so every second month over winter until in spring they actually started to recover and put on new green growth. It was amazing, what I had been told appeared to be working and as of today about a year later those plants are all doing very well and showing no affects whatever of the phosphorus. That high nitrogen fertilizer actually worked. The next step will be retry some of the types of plants that died and see if I can get them to grow with the use of that fertilizer, but that's for further down the track.
As far as which plants died and which plants survived this is still a work in progress but I will make it the subject an article very soon. So please......... stay tuned!
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