Why Travel Nurse Agencies are Recruiting More Than Ever

by: Karen Williams

Html View | Print View Total views: 1 Word Count: 521
Date: Mon, 26 Jul 2010 Time: 6:00 AM - 0 comments

The profession of the travel nurse has taken on an even more important aspect: it is a certifiable fact that the average nurse, whose age is just over 40, will be retiring within a few years, thus creating even more nursing jobs that can barely be filled with the recruits of today.

This potential crisis is slightly alarming. Ad to the fact that states like California now require a 5-1 Nurse to patient ratio, thanks to state-mandate, making it very difficult for hospitals and medical facilities to staff properly as well as meet the needs of their patients, which always comes first. The agencies who provide travel nurses are growing in exponential proportion, however, in order to be able to both fill this niche and make a good profit while doing so.

These agencies normally offer much high pay rates than anyone else can, because of the demand for nurses. Hospitals and medical facilities alike are more than willing to pay for high-quality nurses, should they require them. With nurses now more in-demand than doctors, this also opens up the nursing field to kids right out of high school, who can work on obtaining career in nursing as soon as possible, should they find that it is a good fit for them.

The other items that can be offered by the agencies include providing the travel nurse with a variety of nursing job types, so as not to achieve job burn-out. This is very important, since the high numbers in nursing position turn-around, largely account for the fact that positions become highly routine and therefore not challenging for some nurses.

Additionally, the length of assignments can be attractive to the travel nurse candidate. He or she might prefer short or long term assignments, or a combination of both. No matter what if offered, nurses are always given the choice to accept an assignment, or it is merely passed on to the next available travel nurse. Either way, everyone seems to win, in that scenario. At least, it certainly seems that way.

But there is another issue that travel nurse agencies must deal with: the job of weeding out really good candidates from unknown candidates. Unknown, meaning a person is just out of nursing school, basically. It is highly unlikely that he or she would make a good candidate without any nursing experience, other than having to work in a clinical environment in order to be certified. Still, some agencies promote the new nurses, if anything to clients who have open nursing positions. The flexibility in that, is due to the fact that some nurses may flourish in a specific environment, and therefore the medical center or hospital might be more then glad to pay a fee in order to keep the nurse as one of their own.

Nursing is not an easy industry to work in, but with more candidates becoming available, perhaps the travel nurse agencies will be able to relax a bit more, especially if all states follow California with regard to state-mandated nurse-to-patient regulations.