Hospitals sometimes hire nurses from out-of-town (travel nurses) on a temporary basis to fill vacancies when permanent staff nurses are hard to find. Our team including Shani Pindek, Melisa Hayman, David Howard, and Maryana Arvan published one of the few research studies on the experiences of being a traveler. The research was published in the peer-reviewed journal Nursing Management to contrast travel nurse versus staff nurse experience. The paper is open-access so anyone can read it without cost.
The Travel Nurse Staffing Strategy
It can be difficult to hire and retain permanent hospital nurses. Hospital nursing can be difficult and stressful, driving many nurses into easier roles, sometimes referred to as soft nursing. One way to fill the gap is to hire temporary nurses through an agency that places travelers in different cities than their home. Pay can be substantially higher for travelers, which is perhaps the main reason nurses choose to travel. Although there is research about the impact of using travel nurses on hospitals and patient care, almost nothing has been published about the impact on the travelers themselves. Our study fills that gap by contrasting travel nurses versus staff nurse experience with stress on the job.
Travel Nurse Versus Staff Nurse Experience
We surveyed nurses licensed in Florida by using a publicly available email list provided by the Florida Department of Health. We received completed surveys from 373 nurses, with 30% of them being travelers and 70% staff nurses. We compared them on seven variables. There were statistically significant differences on three variables.
- Travelers were higher on physical fatigue at work.
- Travelers were asked more often to take on tasks they considered inappropriate for them to do.
- Travelers had higher intentions to quit the job.
There were no significant differences on four variables.
- Overall job satisfaction: Despite more inappropriate tasks, travelers had the same satisfaction.
- Pay satisfaction: Travelers can have a substantially higher hourly rate of pay. Yet their pay satisfaction was not higher than staff nurses, or perhaps more correctly, they were equally dissatisfied with pay.
- Workload: Travelers and staff nurses report having the same amount of work to do.
- Burnout: Perhaps it isn’t surprising that burnout levels are the same given that workloads are equivalent.
These results suggest that travelers experience the job a little differently than staff nurses, but some of the differences might have more to do with traveling than nursing. Adjusting to a new city and job might be why the travelers experienced more exhaustion and why they had more frequent thoughts of quitting. We concluded that nursing managers need to pay closer attention to their travelers, as their experience in some ways is worse than the permanent staff nurses they are filling in for.
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