Ask a Travel Nurse Expert: How can I learn more about specific Travel Nurse Agencies?

Ask a Travel Nurse Question:

How can I learn more about specific Travel Nurse Agencies?

Ask a Travel Nurse Answer:

I always encourage people to go about investigating companies in several ways.

First, always check them out on the travel forums and see what other travelers may have to say about them. But, you should keep in mind that you’ll are likely to find good and bad things about every company out there. What you want to look for are patterns. Some great websites, other than here at travelnursingblogs.com, are ultimatenurse.com, travelnursingcentral.com, allnurses.com, and the Delphi forum for traveling professionals (go to delphiforums.com, look for the box on the right that says “Explore existing forums”, type in “travel nursing” and the top result is a group called Travel Nurses and Therapists).

Pan Travelers is also another good site with a forum and you can also join Healthcare Travelbook (healthcaretravelbook.com), which is a sort of Facebook style place for travelers, which also has a forum.

You can either search the posts for a particular company or sign up and seek out other members who might have had experience with the company by a post of your own.

Another way to gauge a travel company can be by the amount of time they have been in business (not all “young” companies are bad, just as not all companies that have been in the business awhile will be good). Longevity just says that they have been doing this awhile and should have most of their ducks in a row (and it also means you should be able to find out more about them on the forums).

Also look and see if they have a Better Business Bureau rating. Not all companies are accredited by the BBB (most might not be) but even if a company is not accredited by the BBB, they may have a rating and you can see if anyone has ever filed a complaint against them.

Finally, I recommend simply typing the company name into a search browser with the word “complaint” or “review”. This sometimes yields some pretty interesting results. In doing so for the company you mentioned, I came across this page:

http://www.indeed.com/cmp/Worldwide-Travel-Staffing/reviews

I hope this helps.

David
david@travelnursesbible.com

Highway to the Danger Zone: As a nurse, have you ever been in the middle of a natural disaster?

Nurses do what they do because they want to help people. But there is an added dimension when a natural disaster hits the area you also reside in — whether you are on assignment in a new location or it is your hometown.

Whatever the cause — tornado, flood, hurricane, wild fire, tsunami, etc. — providing care and comfort to a community during and throughout the aftermath of a natural disaster can be especially challenging. A nurse must remain strong, managing his or her own fear for their own welfare, as well as the welfare of their family, patients, and colleagues.

A brand new nurse “and I mean brand new — took NCLEX and got my license last week-type new” recently shared her story on AllNurses.com of getting through a night of severe weather in a small hospital in northeast Nebraska. The area, covering an approximately 60-mile zone from Stanton, NE, to Sioux City Iowa, was ravaged by twin tornados and other severe weather this June. The small town of Pilger, Nebrask, essentially wiped off the map, but for debris, was just one decimated example of the storm’s ferocity.

It was during this storm that this brand new nurse, who posted under the handle angie2927, was doing some training at her new job. Tornado warnings are common enough in the region, so she wasn’t too alarmed at first. But then, as hospital staff were called in to prepare for casualties, she writes, “Suddenly, things started getting serious.”

“The more experienced nurses knew what they were doing and what their assignments were,” she continued. “Some went to the scene to conduct triage, others were preparing treatment rooms, and still others had to ensure that proper care was being taken of the patients already in our facility. I ended up in the front entryway helping families who didn’t know where their loved ones were or what their condition was.”

The new nurse was desperately worried about her own children, who were at daycare. She writes about comforting and caring for others while worrying about her own loved ones. Even though she’s very new on the job, this nurse shared that she had already learned about a very hard part of nursing:

“Nurses are the people who take care of other people’s families even when they are desperately worried about their own.”

Have you ever been caught in natural disaster? What did you do to provide care and comfort as a nurse while also experiencing the situation on a personal level? Share your stories of bravery in the comments!