Are you a nurse who wants to retire, but you can’t afford to quit your job? Retirement can seem like a pipedream when you need a regular paycheck in order to pay your bills.
Fortunately, nurses nearing retirement age have options. Travel nursing allows nurses to experience a retirement lifestyle while the paychecks keep rolling in.

Aging baby boomers are facing the hard cold facts about retirement. No one can survive on social security alone, and you can only make a limited amount of money each year until you become sixty-five years old if you opt to start taking social security at age 62. Travel nursing is a viable option for nurses facing these dilemmas because travel nurse agencies offer flexible work schedules not offered by other employers. Travel nurses choose their assignments and hours. They can work as many hours as they want during the year in order to meet specific Social Security benefit guidelines. Travel nursing also solves another problem faced by retirees who opt to take social security at age 62. The government deducts nearly 25 percent of monthly income benefits to anyone who opts to take social security at age 62. These monthly deductions do not stop at age 65, but continue on for a lifetime. Nurses can make up this shortfall in their monthly income benefits by working as a travel nurse.

There are many other advantages to working as a travel nurse. Travel nurses live the retirement lifestyle while they work. Do you have kids? Great! Travel around the country to see your family as you work as a travel nurse. Do you hate winter weather? No problem! You can work under the sunny skies of the Sunbelt during the winter months as a travel nurse. Travel nurse agencies pay for moving expenses, housing, and utilities while you enjoy life. Most travel nurse companies also pay for state nursing licenses and health care benefits, as well as sign on and renewal bonuses. And don’t think that you are too old to be a travel nurse because nothing is farther from the truth. Employers are looking for mature nurses with a wealth of lifetime knowledge. Your knowledge and wisdom are desperately needed in all areas of the health care market. Employers are looking for nurses just like you to fill vacancies within the workplace.

Enjoy a retirement life style by paying your way as you go. Look into working as a travel nurse. You can find Travel Nursing Jobs listed by state or job function on the NursingJobs.org website. If you’re of retirement age, and are working as a travel nurse, please stop by NursingVoices and share your experience with others. We are waiting to hear from you!

A long time ago, nurses worked in one of three places when they graduated from nursing school. A new graduate could work as a bedside nurse, an office nurse, or as a school nurse. Today, nurses can find jobs in all areas of health care, and they are finding those jobs around the corner, as well as around the world. Travel nursing is a great lifestyle for nurses who love to explore new areas of the country while they are exploring their options in the health care marketplace. Are you thinking about hitting the road as a travel nurse? Learn more about travel nursing by taking this short quiz.

1) True or false: The nursing job market in exploding, and travel nurses are in high demand.

True: The Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) projected that the nursing shortage will only to get worse over the next two decades. The demand for nurses is projected to grow by 40% by 2020, and as more nurses approach retirement, the nursing field is projected to have the second largest number of new jobs among all occupations in the United States. That’s good news for nurses who are looking for a fulfilling career. Rising job vacancies mean that you are in demand, and that you can find a job as a travel nurse that’s just right for you.

2) True or False: Travel nurse agencies don’t offer benefits.

False: Travel nurses get better than average pay, as well as many other perks. Travel nursing agencies pay for housing and travel expenses. They also offer nurses other benefits such as health insurance and 401(k) plans. Some agencies also offer continuing-education assistance, and most travel nurse companies will pay for state nursing licenses. If you like meeting new people while making great wages and benefits, then a travel nursing job is right for you.

3) True or False: Travel nurses are told where to work, and they must sign long-term contracts in order to find a job.

False: Travel nurses have complete control over the assignments that they accept, and job assignments are flexible. Work assignments can last anywhere between four weeks to one year. The travel nurse decides what contract suits their needs.

4) True of false: You’re never too old to be a travel nurse.

True: There is no age limit. Anyone can be a travel nurse. Travel nursing allows you to keep your health care benefits while going into semi-retirement. Travel with your spouse, your kids, or your pets. It’s up to you. Travel nursing let’s you do it all.

A travel nursing career is for those who enjoy life on the road. You can find Travel Nurse Jobs listed by state or job function on the NursingJobs.org website.

Ok, now it’s your turn. Are you a travel nurse? If so, I would love you to add your insights into the pros and cons of travel nursing. That will help make all of us a little smarter, and I’ll have something impressive to say next time I’m asked about travel nursing. Please contribute your experiences and opinions either in the comments section below or in the NursingVoices forum.

The nursing jobs marketplace is changing, and more nurses than ever are choosing travel nursing as their career. The job outlook for travel nurses is phenomenal, and it’s getting better everyday. Here are some reasons why nurses are pulling up stakes and are choosing to live out of a suitcase.

Great Pay and Benefits

There are many benefits to working as a travel nurse. First and foremost is the salary. Travel nurse jobs are lucrative. We all know that there’s a nursing shortage, and employers are willing to pay competitive wages to attract highly trained nursing professionals to their facilities. Traveling RNs can make between $30-$40 an hour, and wages are higher in areas of the country that have a higher cost of living. The benefits are great, too. Travel nurses can see the country while their agencies pay for their moving expenses, housing, utilities, and health insurance. Most travel nurse companies also pay for state nursing licenses, as well as sign on and renewal bonuses.

See the Country, See the World

Travel nurse agencies have job openings all over the country, as well as around the world. There are jobs out there that will meet your needs. Do you hate winter weather and shoveling your car out of a snowdrift? You can work as a travel nurse in the Sunbelt during the winter months and go back home in the spring. Are you tired of rush hour traffic and long commutes? Then maybe it’s time to move to a rural community and work as a travel nurse. Travel nurses can also see the world by working for a cruise line, or by accepting an overseas assignment. Travel nurse companies are currently looking for RNs who want to work in Australia and in the Middle East. Assignments can last from just a few weeks to many months. You have total control over the assignment that you accept.

If you enjoy hitting the road, than travel nursing is the career for you. Travel nurse agencies are looking for you.

You can find Travel Nurse Jobs listed by state or job function on the NursingJobs.org website..

Welcome to the Nursing Jobs.org edition of Change of Shift, the nursing blog carnival!

It’s the first edition of the new year, so let’s jump right in!

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Sandy Szwarc weighs in this edition (pardon the pun) with two timely posts from Junkfood Science. It’s the new year, and many of us have made a resolution to lose weight. What are the chances for success? In a two part submission, Sandy first looks at Part One: What does the evidence reveal? Can diets work? Get ready for a shock in Part Two. And then take a breath and relax. I did.

Mousie presents a real-life nightmare in A Steep Learning Curve. (Part 1.). This is my biggest fear. I’m still trying to get my pulse back to normal. You’ll find Part One posted at Mousethinks.

Emily gives a wonderful primer for the new nurse blogger in Guide for the New (and old!) Nurse Blogger . I’ve been blogging for 2 1/2 years and I can’t add a thing to this wonderful list of ideas for the new blogger and refresher for us oldies. The advice is posted at NursingBytes.net. Check it out. And if you aren’t already blogging, please consider it - you have much to contribute to the online dialog!

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Oh, this one is a doozy! And if it didn’t come from Mother Jones herself, I’d have never believed it! But it’s true and you can read all about Dirty Talk at Nurse Ratched’s Place. Don’t say I didn’t warn ya!

Marachne is a palliative/hospice nurse and frequent contributor to the Nursing Voices forum. In her first submission to Change of Shift, she shares with us the feelings of seeing her profession and her activism merge in Intersecting Worlds: Bearing Witness, found on her wonderful blog, A Window For Your Home.

Alvaro Fernandez is a frequent contributor to Change of Shift and this week he presents an interesting look at Brain Evolution and Why it is Meaningful Today to Improve Our Brain Health via an article by Larry McCleary, M.D, former acting Chief of Pediatric Neurosurgery at Denver Children’s Hospital, posted at SharpBrains. Find out how diet and exercise can keep our brains functioning at maximum capacity.

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Well I have to catch up with my fellow nurse bloggers! Beth over at Pixel RN has a new look and a beautiful story of being in the right place at the right time to bring encouragement to her patient. You can read about it in Healing a Different Kind of Pain. Great story! Beth was also a web designer in a former life and has some suggestions for would-be nurse bloggers in Design Resources for the Nurse Blogger.

Nurse Sean has made a New Year’s Resolution to keep an eye out for the “big picture” where his patients are concerned. Check out his Nursing New Year’s Resolution. How do you keep on top of things?

Ever dealt with low morale at work? Disappearing John is doing just that and has figured out why in Something Went “Click”. Management by memo, sign and email? I most definitely can relate…

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Another first time Change of Shift blogger! Katie Bee at Young and Restless Nurse wants to know what you think about labor unions and their impact on your practice. She mentions a CNA/NNOC ad campaign referencing “CheneyCare”, a campaign which ticked me off big time! So, join me in reading MAD Money and let Katie know what you think!

Over at Medscape, Beka made it home for the holidays - in her case celebrated in the Swedish tradition - but still wondered about her patients back home. Her Holiday Memories sound wonderful. I’d go for making an ice rink in the backyard! All we have is mud! Her blog can be found at Medscape’s In Our Own Words.

Vreni Gurd is not a nurse, but she presents a rather entertaining look at Hospital food - an Opportunity Waiting? posted at Wellness Tips. If I’m ever in the hospital, she can cook for me!

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Just for fun, I pulled an old post from the Emergiblog archives, specifically January of 2007. My submission this week discussess what to do when the burn out has hit and it’s time to move on in If You Don’t Have the Answer, Why You Still Standin’ Here?

The next edition of Change of Shift will be up on January 24th and hosted by Beth at Pixel RN. Submissions may be sent to Blog Carnival or to beth at pixelrn dot com.

Thanks so much for reading and for your continued support of Change of Shift!

Do hospitals take on too much responsibility for patients? Is it really up to a healthcare establishment to fix everything wrong with a patient’s life? If a patient comes in with a broken foot but is also homeless, is it up to the hospital to find a place for that person to go in addition to treating the broken foot?

That’s how Geena begins the latest poll over on Nursing Voices, and she continues:

When a patient is discharged and has a home but no one can come and pick them up, why is it our job to get them cab fare or a bus token?

I actually discharged a patient once in this situation. He said he had no one to pick him up, so if I could just take him out to the bus stop he’d take it from there. I felt really weird doing that. I’ve had other patients demand cab fare to get home.

Am I making sense? I don’t mean to sound insensitive, but I don’t see how we can fix everything.

If the patient has nowhere to live, and there’s nowhere to take them - what are we supposed to do? I feel like the way things are going, we’re going to have to start feeding patient’s cats while they’re in the hospital.

Of course it would be nice if we could fix everyone’s problems, but our resources are already stretched thin.

What’s your opinion?

Let her (and all of us) know by voting today!

We’re helping Nursing Voices with the official launch of their new nursing forum by giving away two brand new iPhones! Check out their official announcement for full details.

Geena from Code Blog writes over on Nursing Voices:

When I started out in nursing, the hospital I worked at required CNA’s to wear cranberry, RT’s to wear teal, and RN’s to wear royal blue. We could wear certain scrub tops that were approved and that matched the royal blue pants. The hospital did not pay for them.

When I moved and got a new job, there were no standard uniforms. We could wear whatever we wanted. Some people took this too far and started looking a bit unprofessional - scrub pants with little t-shirts that actually showed off belly buttons when the nurse moved around.

…

I’m curious about how many out there are required to wear a certain type/color of uniform?

Let them know by voting in the poll!

Geena from Code Blog writes over on Nursing Voices:

Do you call the docs you work with by their first names?

Docs get to call us by our first names, but why is it not reciprocable? (Yes, I made that word up)

I’ve been at my current hospital for 7 years, but there are only a handful that I call by their first names. One or two have told me that I can; with the other few their first names just came out one day and since they didn’t seem offended, I just kept at it.
I always call them “Dr. SoAndSo” if we’re in earshot of patients or families.

There are some nurses I work with that call many doctors by their first names, but those are usually the nurses who have been there for decades working with these docs.

What do you do?

Let them know by voting in the poll!

If you’re a nurse working in a hospital, chances are you’ve recently attended a customer service workshop. I just went to a program on AIDET as part of nursing orientation. A lot of what was talked about was not new:being respectful and attentive, giving clear and concise explanations and including the patient and family in the decision making process. What did surprise was when the instructor said that customer satisfaction scores are now being tied to federal funding.

That got me thinking. Up to now I’ve only been familiar with the Press Gaineys, a private survey firm. I’m sure your hospital has something similiar. Patients are selected to receive the survey after discharge and they rate the hospital, nurses, doctors and other services. It is hospital driven and customized to the institution. In 2005, however, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services(CMS) came up with a standardized survey to track customer satisfaction, wordily called the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Health Providers and Systems. HCAHPS, or Hospital CAHPS, or the CAHPS hospital survey, is a voluntary survey. However, according to this article from the New York Sun, hospitals that don’t report their results can lose 2% of their inpatient Medicare funding. At this time, hospitals do not have to pay to participate.

CAHPS(with and without the first H) are funded and administered by the U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality(AHRQ). The CAHPS program was started almost a decade ago, so that a standardized system of patient surveys could be put into place to help improve patient centered care. There’s a CAHPS for dental plans and another to assess the health care experiences of Native Americans’ use of tribal clinics, among others. The survey results are part of the public domain and available online.

So why should any of this concern us as nurses? Besides the fact that it’s an hour of my life I’ll never have back again. I’ve heard much grumbling from the trenches about how this is just another ploy by the hospital to make money and make our jobs harder. What matters is delivering top-notch nursing care, not being warm and fuzzy. Nurses are a tough crowd with the best of topics, but try telling them that they’re not being nice enough and you’re liable to have a revolt on your hands.

Patient satisfaction is important(sorry, to me they’re still patients, not customers). My experiences as a transplant coordinator bear this out. As I’m sure you know, asking a family to donate their organs couldn’t happen at a worse time. Who wants to make such an important decision when dealing with the death of a loved one? Unfortunately, time is of the essence and we work in a small window of time to make the request, sometimes only a few hours. Gaining a family’s trust is tantamount. I’m not talking about putting one over on people. I’m saying that within the short time frame allowed, you have to not only help the family come to terms with brain death, you have to give them all the information they need to make an informed choice. This doesn’t just apply to life and death situations. Patient education and planning care are synonymous with nursing. Managed care means that many of our patients are only with us for a few days. In the ER or Same Day Surgery, a few hours. It should come as no surprise to anyone that increasing a patient’s satisfaction, increasing their trust and comfort levels, is going to enhance their learning and increase their desire to participate in the healthcare plan.

Hospitals love to have good survey results. They plaster them in the papers and work them into their advertising. So is all this good PR for the hospital? You bet. Should nurses be valued for their ability to start an IV as well as their winning smile? Absolutely. But the bottom line is that keeping patients happy can also be good for their health.

Nursing research is very serious business.

It’s what our practice is based on.

It’s why we do what we do the way we do it.

Being new to the concept of nursing research, I learn a lot by writing this column every week.

There are some pretty big projects going on out there and I’m amazed at the amount of research that nurses are involved in.

I really had no idea.

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One thing I have learned is that there is research done by nurses and then there is research done on nurses/nursing. I’m not sure the latter qualifies as “nursing research” but occasionally the projects are interesting or the results are surprising.

I was surprised to find a study in Applied Nursing Research that attempted to ascertain the opinion of nurses regarding single vs. multiple occupancy patient rooms.

It’s no secret that private rooms help decrease infection, increase privacy, decrease noise, minimize the possibility of errors and allow interaction with family and friends. Nurses know this - we see it everyday.

In this study (funded by the Coalition for Health Environments Research and Facility Guidelines Institute), the preference of nurses for single occupancy rooms is established and documented.

Why am I surprised?

I’m surprised that a group of non-nursing researchers evaluated the available literature on the effect of single occupancy vs. multiple occupancy rooms on patient outcomes and realized were no studies involving nurses.

So… they went and solicited that input in the form of a research project asking nurses to make comparative assessments between the single and multiple occupancy patient rooms.

The results. Nurses prefer them in every way. From room set-up to actual patient care, single occupancy wins every time.

We knew that.

Now there is literature in the research community that confirms it.

Maybe I should not be amazed that a group of researchers decided to obtain the opinion of nurses regarding the physical set up of a hospital unit.

Then again, who would know better than the nurses who function in that environment?

The fact that these researchers realized that nurses have a unique perspective and sought to document it shows respect for the nursing profession.

That is always good to see.

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Resource: Chaudhury, H., Mahmood, A., & Valente, M. (2006). Nurses’ percepton of single-occupancy versus multioccupancy rooms in acute care environments: an exploratory comparative assessment. Applied Nursing Research, 19(3), 118-125.