Why Healthcare Facilities Love Travel Nurses

Often in travel nursing, we focus on the benefits that travel nurses can enjoy when taking a travel nursing assignment. However, this is a two-way street. Healthcare facilities also benefit from their working travel nurses, and are grateful for the benefits that you provide them. Here are a few of the reasons these facilities hire travel nurses, and the ways travel nurses impact the facilities at which they work.

Increased Cost Efficiency

Although travel nurses are usually paid a higher base rate than permanent nurses, travel nurses don’t come with all the same costs as their permanent counterparts: onboarding, training, and benefits packages are all costs that travel nurses don’t incur to facilities.

This makes travel nurses more attractive to facilities trying to keep their overall clinical staff costs down. And since travel nurses are on short-term contracts, it’s easy for facilities to manage their budgets through hiring travel nurses when they need them, rather than only staffing permanent nurses for longer lengths of time.

Higher Quality Patient Care

It’s well known that with higher levels of nurse staffing, patient care quality and patient outcomes both improve dramatically. Higher nurse staffing levels are directly related to lower mortality rates and infections in patients throughout all hospital settings.

Higher staffing levels also increases nurse job satisfaction, which has also been linked to better patient outcomes. With higher satisfaction comes a better work environment, which has shown to decrease patient mortality.

Improved Patient Satisfaction

With more nurses on the floor, more patients can be given the attention they need during their stay at the hospital. By bringing travel nurses in, hospitals can ensure that patients are getting the right amount of care, and improve patient satisfaction. Both seasoned and new travel nurses bring experience that can directly improve the patient experience, which hospitals love.

Lower Nurse Burnout

As we all know, we are facing a nursing shortage in America. This leads to many nurses becoming burnt out, which has shown to lower patient satisfaction and the quality of patient outcomes. By bringing in travel nurses, hospitals can manage the workload of their permanent nurses. This leads to lower amounts of burnout throughout nurses, and improves patient outcomes.

Greater Staff Flexibility

As we’ve recently seen during the COVID-19 crisis, situations can arise where more nurses are required at facilities on short notice. Instead of going through the full hiring process and hiring permanent nurses, facilities are able to hire travel nurses who can start immediately, with years of experience behind them.

Even without a pandemic, bringing just one travel nurse into a facility can dramatically improve the patient experience and patient outcomes for smaller facilities.

These are just a few of the reasons hospitals and healthcare facilities love travel nurses. If you’re ready to bring some much-needed relief to a hospital, while seeing the country and traveling to your dream location,