Heather Norton had long wanted to travel the country, but her schedule — and salary — wouldn’t permit it.
So last month, Norton took the plunge, leaving her positions at a Raleigh, N.C., hospital and as a part-time nursing instructor at Wake Technical Community College. She signed on as a travel nurse, combining the profession she loves with the change of scenery she craved, boosting her salary in the process.
“Once you decide you want to do travel nursing, recruiters are everywhere,” said Norton, who graduated from nursing school a decade ago. “You can have your choice of jobs in every state in the country. This gives me a lot more opportunity.”
In the hospital where she worked for the past seven years, Norton “floated,” moving between different floors and different specialties such as telemetry or surgery.
As the COVID-19 pandemic has worn on, taxing nurses’ physical strength and emotional tolerance for bedside work, thousands of travel nursing companies have been luring away hospital staff.
“The salaries they promise go up almost weekly,” said Danny Yoder, emergency department manager at UNC Rex Healthcare. “I just saw an offer for a travel nurse in Florida for $5,200 a week.”
In the previous two weeks, Yoder said, the emergency department had hired eight nurses and still had nine openings.
While travel nursing predates the pandemic, the industry boomed once it hit. During the delta variant surge in the fall, agencies offering ever-higher salaries have lured nurses from hospitals all over the country.
Hospitals often are left to fill the gaps using travel nurses, sometimes hiring back their own former employees at a much higher rate.
Being a travel nurse
As travelers, nurses tell recruiters what kind of work they want to do and where, then sign contracts to stay in a place for a few months at a time.
Offers may include money for expenses such as extended stays in hotels or Airbnbs, along with meals and travel costs. During COVID-19 surges, extra money was offered for nurses willing to work at hospitals in crisis areas where the number of cases was overwhelming.
Those people will earn their money, Norton said.
“COVID patients, when I worked with them, they could change at the drop of a hat. They could be stable and then literally crash in a matter of minutes, they’re that unpredictable. So if you saw their oxygen levels drop just a little bit, you would kind of go on alert.”
In her new job, Norton said, she didn’t want to travel too far right away because she has two teenage children at home. So she took an assignment at the same hospital where she started her nursing career, Scotland Memorial in Laurinburg, N.C.
Norton usually works three 12-hour shifts a week.
Next summer, she said, when her kids are out of school, Norton would like to take them with her on a travel nursing assignment in Hawaii.
“And once they graduate, we could just sell the house, get an RV, take travel assignment and just travel the world. That’s something we’ve never had the time or the money to do.”
— Tribune News Service
