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ometimes a Travel Nurse can get a little despondent. After all, the assignment is typically in a strange city, where you may not have any friends. The way things are supposed to be done in the new facility may be quite different from the way you’ve been trained. The doctors, administrators, and other nurses don’t know you, and assume you’ll soon be gone—so there’s little incentive to make the effort to be a friend. You’re given extra work more frequently than the regulars; because you’re being paid more, they think it’s only fair. Sometimes you feel nobody listens to you; since you haven’t been there very long, what could you possibly know?
On top of all this, you are in one of the world’s most demanding professions, where almost everything you do is critical, where lives hang in the balance for each decision you have to make. A single mistake can ruin your career. Talk about stress! It’s amazing that nurses, be it Travel or home-based, are ever able to cope!
Well cheer up, bucko, because as a Travel Nurse you represent the contemporary version of what is, historically, the oldest variant of this time-honored and noble profession. Nurses existed long before there was such a thing as a hospital, and most nurses had to travel to their assignments, which were sites of calamity or battle. A thousand years ago, when a crude stone cathedral came crashing down or a new disease flowed over the hills and down into a village, there were never enough nurses nearby, so the call went out: “We need Travel Nurses, and we need them now!”
Even today, you are in the part of the profession experiencing the greatest growth. Our culture is changing too rapidly for predictions or forecasts to be guaranteeable, but trends in the reshaping of our lives can be seen. Work opportunities, in general, no longer fit the image of a job down the street to which one can go at 8:00 a.m. five days a week for the rest of one’s life. Instead, today’s opportunities are clustered around two models. The first involves information technology, in which one works at a high-tech center (which in some cases can be created in one’s home) for customers scattered all over the world. The second is the rapidly rising domain of the mobile professional.
It’s obvious and beyond dispute that this has to be one of the main kinds of employment in the future. As our culture becomes more complex, specialization will inevitably increase, and some of the things that have to be done do not have to be done that often at any particular location. Think of calibrating nuclear fuel rods: we don’t need a calibrator in every state, obviously, but we need calibrators who can move around.
Experts agree that for the foreseeable future the rate of change will only increase. The average life-span of a business being done in a given locale will get shorter and shorter. Communities will try to stay competitive by changing their strategy to better fit evolving global conditions. With each new program in a given area, there are new chances for accident, illness, or psychological desyncopation. No one can predict which community might be most effective, and having nursing forces sitting around in every evolving community is not an economically feasible solution. Therefor the profession of Travel Nurse is a necessary accouterment for a successful modern society.
So if an occasional snide remark from a home-based nurse, or the piling on of extra work by an uncaring administrator, is getting you down, take heart! You are engaged in a career that is more in tune with what our society needs than are these envious detractors. You are the one who is out there, an independent and brave person taking charge of your life. You have made some sacrifices, but you have a game plan. You work unbelievably hard to achieve long-term goals, along the way improving your knowledge, experience, and education—and the lives of all the patients you touch.
You are part of a wave of the future. Those who don’t understand this should not cause you any anguish. After all, they are little more than small-minded dinosaurs, who don’t yet realize that the world is leaving them behind.
