Tips for Leading Travel Nurses - Emerging Nurse Leader

By Rose O. Sherman, EdD, RN, NEA-BC, FAAN

Travel nurses have become an integral part of staffing plans in many settings during COVID-19. Yet, there is little guidance for nurse managers on not only how to integrate travelers into your staff but also how to use their breadth of experience to improve your unit practice. Don’t adopt the viewpoint that travel nurses are a necessary evil or a budget buster and leave it at that. These nurses help you through a critical time, and you can learn a great deal from them. Here are some tips to become a better leader when traveling nurses are assigned to your unit:

Introduce yourself – take time to meet every traveler assigned to your unit. Let them know they are valued members of the team and contact you if they need to.
Ensure traveler nurses are oriented – orientation is needed even in this time with streamlined onboarding. Make sure your travel nurses know who to go to with their questions.
Check-in with your travel nurses and seek feedback – many nurses working on travel contracts during COVID are highly experienced and have worked in some of the country’s best healthcare systems. Why not use their expertise? Ask them what is going well on the unit and where improvement is needed. Seek out information about best practices that have seen work in other settings.
Ask questions to raise your strategic awareness – nurse leaders are often told that they are not strategic in their thinking. Part of raising your strategic awareness in interpreting what is going on in the larger healthcare system. Travel nurses can be an important source of information about patterns and trends that they are seeing in environments where they working. They are seeing early patterns that could lead to later changes so use their observations and reflect on implications for your own environment.
Recognize the quality of care they give is likely to be as good as your own staff – every research study that I have reviewed refutes the idea that safety and quality are compromised with supplemental staff.
Embrace the traveler as a welcome addition to your unit – being a traveler has tradeoffs. It can be lonely when you don’t feel anchored to any one location. Your staff may not realize that travel nurses’ contracts can be terminated with little notice and the advertised pay is not what most actually receive.
Include your travel nurses in celebrations and parties – most will not be at home for the holiday.
Treat your travel nurses as you would want to be treated – many of these nurses have large social networks and remember their positive experiences. I would not be surprised to see a percentage of this group as future nurse leaders. Not only do they get to view practice trends that work or don’t work, but they also learn to become excellent team players quickly.
Understand that there are many reasons why nurses might choose travel nursing – most nurses don’t do travel nursing for their entire careers. I have many nurse leader friends who have done travel nursing to assess whether they enjoy a geographic area or gain broader clinical experience. Be curious about what led to the choice – it can give you insight into recruitment and retention trends. The more that you, as a leader, understand the pros and cons of the decision to become a travel nurse – the more effective you will be in educating and retaining staff.

It is hard to know at this point, the impact that COVID-19 will have on long-term nurse staffing. Many predict that shortages in acute care could persist for quite a long time. Patient volumes moving forward are also unknown. Travel nurses will likely continue to be used to supplement lower levels of core staffing or a very inexperienced workforce, albeit at much lower pay rates. Wise nurse leaders will use a crisis like this to learn as much as possible about this staffing option.

Read to Lead

Faller M. Six Ways to Help Travel Nurses Adjust to Your Organization https://www.amnhealthcare.com/blog/help-travel-nurses-adjust-to-your-organization/

Read Rose Sherman’s book – The Nurse Leader Coach: Become the Boss No One Wants to Leave