Bridgett Robbins is an Assistant teaching professor at the Sinclair School of Nursing, but before that she worked as a nurse in Mid-Missouri for more than 30 years.
She spoke about how travel nursing can impact hospitals and about why she believes some students want to sign traveling contracts.
Missouri Health Talks gathers Missourians’ stories of access to healthcare in their own words.
Bridgett Robbins: I've never been a travel nurse, but I can, I mean, I can envision that it sounds pretty sexy, you know, you get to travel all over the world and see all kinds of new places.
Typically, those are 13-week contracts, and you can repeat a contract and stay at the same place.
It is at a higher level of pay. They don't get a very lengthy orientation, in some cases, just a few days of orientation to work in a hospital setting where they haven't worked.
Some of the challenges with having traveler nurses work in any hospital is that they're not going to stay there. It doesn't matter if they make a bunch of friends or care about the long-term goals of the hospital.
"I don't know if traveling to South Dakota – not that I have anything against South Dakota or some other obscure areas of the country – is maybe the exotic vacation travel that they were looking for."Bridgett Robbins
So, they're just there to take care of patients and leave and to make most hospitals run well, you want people that are owners, that want to help the whole organization be better, that care about the community and the people that are in it.
I'm not saying that all travelers don't have feelings of, you know, being invested in patients, but they also, you know, as far as travelers – when you're a brand-new traveler, you kind of get sold a dream that might not quite come to fruition.
So, you're gonna work in a hospital that's significantly understaffed. Probably having more patients than you've typically taken care of. In a place that you're not familiar with.
And so, I don't know if you can research how many dollars an hour that hospitals were paying for a travel nurse, but it was four and five times more than the nurses that were getting paid, you know, on the unit, but that didn't mean the nurse was getting that.
So, I really felt like the travel agencies were taking advantage of that moment, and still are. I mean, it's disheartening.
As far as being a traveler, I mean, I think travelers are definitely necessary in many circumstances.
Some hospitals, their census will go up for certain periods of time and then go down and it would be better to hire some travelers for those time periods instead of hiring people that you can't keep and then you have to lay off later.
So, there is a place for travelers and temporary work staff.
You'd asked me if it seemed like the younger professionals were interested in traveling more so, and they definitely are. The money is definitely one of the things that they're interested in.
When they hear that they can possibly get paid double what they're getting paid now, and the idea that they might be able to travel and you know, I don't know if traveling to South Dakota – not that I have anything against South Dakota or some other obscure areas of the country – is maybe the exotic vacation travel that they were looking for.
But you know, they have to do all of those – they don't always get assignments in Hawaii.
