Jordan Young is Co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of AMX Healthcare, a leading national allied health & travel nurse staffing agency.
getty
Travel nursing can be traced as far back as the 19th century when pioneers such as Florence Nightingale led a group of 38 nurses from London to Constantinople to serve the growing number of sick and injured British soldiers during the Crimean War.
Humanitarian Clara Barton, the founder of the American Red Cross, traveled with the Union Army during the Civil War and helped build makeshift hospitals near the front lines to bring necessary supplies and care for injured, battle-weary soldiers. These groundbreaking nurses are among many others who introduced the idea that nurses could travel to different locations to assist those in need.
In modern times, travel nursing in America expanded rapidly in response to the widespread nursing shortage of the 1970s. New Orleans became the first area to hire contracted nurses brought in from other parts of the country to support an influx of patients during the crowded Mardi Gras season of 1978. That same year, a Boston businessman by the name of Bruce Male, set up the very first travel nurse agency, Traveling Nurse Corps. As the national nursing shortages continued into the 1980s, contract nursing became the temporary solution.
Travel nurse assignments soon became an established cost-effective method for healthcare organizations and hospitals to deal with staff shortages. It also gave nurses seeking new challenges an exciting opportunity to hone their skills, acquire industry experience and expand their horizons. For HR leaders in healthcare systems across the country, the current state of travel nursing provides lessons for managing staff in the future—whether management happens in-house or through an outside partner.
The Pandemic’s Impact
More recently, Covid-19 changed the landscape of nursing, and the employment of travel nurses skyrocketed. From the earliest days of the pandemic, intensive care units (ICUs) overflowed across the country, and the healthcare system became strained like never before. Since then, many nurses faced burnout and chose less demanding roles in non-hospital and outpatient settings, or left the profession altogether—and that trend is continuing.
Travel nurses previously represented 3% to 4% of all nursing staff in the U.S. That figure has since risen to 10%, despite average travel nurse pay trending down. Travel clinicians enjoy the flexibility that accompanies short-term contracts, and so by offering flexible work schedules, healthcare employers can retain and attract the best talent.
A Long-Term Strategic Role
However, travel nurses as a temporary fix will not fully heal the nursing crisis. Without a long-term strategy, relying heavily on temporary and contracted staff can bring disruption and leave permanent staff feeling fragmented. Small, rural hospitals are typically impacted by these challenging scenarios the most, as they often lack the resources to compete with larger hospital networks.
Staffing agencies offer an opportunity to strategically connect smaller hospitals with the right clinicians at the right time. In addition to saving hospitals time and resources, this recruitment resource helps promote the seamless integration of temporary and permanent staff, by providing travel nurses with the resources and tools they need to succeed and the vetting of skills, credentials, and availability and onboarding for each facility. Healthcare providers with more resources routinely recruit and hire travel nurses directly through job boards or their own careers page and are able to onboard effectively to ensure they can successfully manage patient care as an integral part of the team.
As we look toward the future, history tells us travel nurses are instrumental in holding the delicate healthcare ecosystem together. Staffing systems—whether in-house or through a third party—should be customer-centric, offering a hyper-focused, tailored hiring process with the goal of recruiting top nursing talent to provide both short- and long-term staffing solutions. As co-founder and chief operating officer for a workforce solutions provider, I see first-hand that communication, compensation, data-driven technology, and ongoing support and training are key industry differentiators. It’s about more than just healthcare temp staffing—it’s about rapid, reliable and strategic workforce solutions when hospitals and healthcare organizations need them the most.
Travel nursing has been a part of the modern nursing workforce for decades, and it is now a strategic staffing solution. Healthcare systems can leverage this resource to ease the current burden and propel patient care into the next post-pandemic chapter without significant disruptions or serious consequences.
Forbes Human Resources Council is an invitation-only organization for HR executives across all industries. Do I qualify?
