I've been a traveling nurse for 19 years now, and am a couple weeks off completing an Interim Management contract in Salinas, CA which was a head-banger. After two weeks of R&R in Ft. Worth, TX I have accepted another contract, this time just as a traveling staff nurse for the OR in Mesa, AZ!
Starting in just a week, and excited to be heading back to AZ where I can enjoy my beloved Southwest desert for at least three months. Since I'll be doing 12-hour day shifts, only three a week, I'll have 4 days off each week, and plan to resume my workout regime regularly again, work on my tan, and explore parts of SW Arizona I didn't have time for the last time I worked in that area a few years ago.
My new boss sounds intelligent...she didn't ask stupid questions like whether I could still take care of patients after doing management for nearly three years, and she had the good sense to interview me within a few hours of receiving my profile, given the extensive amount of experience I have posted on my resume. If she lives up to my impression of her, we should have a great contract...so I'm eager to get started.
Will let you know how my first week goes in another couple weeks, and see where this leads.
Travelog of a veteran traveling OR nurse giving you insight into the world of contract travel nurses, a unique perspective of the Operating Room, and lots of interesting events that happen along the way.
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1 comment:
May 28 My contract started this past Monday, and the first week of work was a predictable blend of mindless, cookie-cutter orientation material, and surprisingly pleasant moments with surgeons while giving lunch relief to scrub nurses. I've found that the quickest way to impress surgeons is to scrub a couple cases with them, and suddenly you're not only "good", you're not just that new traveler nurse, you're someone they recognize by name.
For a traveler, orientation, by nature, tends to be extremely repetitive because by law, all employees have to be given the same information about how the hospital functions and its expectations of employees. Of course, at some point, they have to separate nurses from all other employees, because they perform some functions that no one else does, so then there's another set of very similar speeches or lessons that nurses get to hear.
In my case, since I've heard these lessons/speeches approximately every three months for the past 18 ears, I could give them myself, and there's rarely any new nuggets that I'm able to glean from the time I'm forced to endure this repetition. My suggestions about orienting OR Travel nurses usually fall on deaf ears, so I usually take along some of my paper projects to achieve some productivity while being a captive audience to the orientation team.
The other problem with orientation is the people who are chosen to administer it or be preceptors in the OR setting. Most of them never get formal training in how to precept another nurse, much less a travel nurse, nor any standard guidelines on what an OR orientation should include. As a result, I often hear this question, "What would you like to know?", which is the most assinine question of all for a preceptor to ask. You're the preceptor for Pete's sake, you're supposed to be telling me what I NEED to know, not what I want to know. If you're going to be a preceptor, put some effort into it, develop a game plan, and give your orientees real value for the brief amount of time allotted to their orientation. It really chaps my cheeks to be given some poorly thought out, half-baked orientation from someone who probably doesn't know what the word preceptor means, and then to have most of my very limited orientation wasted. Which is pretty much how my orientation has gone so far.
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