There’s a lot to love about a career in nursing. You get to spend your life helping people. You have the honor of being present for some of life’s most precious moments, from birth to death. And, of course, you also have the assurance of a steady income and ample job opportunities.
Being a travel nurse, however, brings with it a new and unique set of advantages in addition to all those already offered by a traditional nursing career. Here are the top four ways that travel nursing can help you develop into a better healthcare provider:
1. You Learn Cross-Cultural Competence
By far, one of the greatest benefits of travel nursing is that you get to work with patients from a diverse array of cultural backgrounds. This means that you are likely to experience the unique challenges and opportunities of delivering care in a range of languages, which can help prepare you for clinical practice in diverse communities at home.
Even more importantly, perhaps, travel nursing enables you to experience different perspectives, attitudes, and practices regarding birth, wellness and dying. This can not only help you to expand and enhance your nursing practices, but it can also increase your cross-cultural competence and your ability to understand, communicate, and empathize with patients and families whose views on health may differ from yours.
2. Provides Invaluable Experience with Global Health Systems
Another crucial benefit of travel nursing is the opportunity to experience the global health system from a truly hands-on perspective. As a travel nurse, you are probably going to find yourself working with some of the most marginalized and underserved patient populations both in the United States and around the world.
This means you will be equipped to understand and respond to systemic challenges, including the pervasive health disparities which persist in the US and other highly developed and immensely wealthy nations. Such experience isn’t just going to make you a better practitioner, but it can open up important opportunities to make a true difference at the administrative and policy level.
3. Adventures that Feed Your Soul
Whether you are already a practicing nurse or you’re preparing for a career in nursing, you probably already understand the profound emotional labor involved in the work. When you earn your living as a care provider, you can expect to experience extreme highs and devastating lows, often within the course of a single shift.
This can be profoundly draining to a nurse’s mind, body, and spirit. However, when you’re a travel nurse, you can find yourself in some truly incredible places. This means that, in your off hours, you can feed your soul with new adventures that simply wouldn’t be possible in the more familiar surroundings of home.
What this means is that your travels can provide you with the personal enrichment you need to prevent burnout and keep you feeling engaged and inspired in both your work and your life.
4. Adaptability, Resilience, and Creative Problem-Solving
Anyone who’s been a travel nurse knows that the job requires a host of unique attributes, including adaptability, resilience, and creative problem-solving. After all, learning to quickly acclimate to a new work environment and the patient roster is a part of the travel nurse’s job description.
That means you’re going to have to learn to deal with stress, think on your feet, and perform at optimal levels even in unfamiliar environments. You are also likely going to learn to creatively improvise, especially if you are working in underserved and remote communities which may lack the resources you have grown accustomed to.
The Takeaway
There’s a lot to love about being a travel nurse, but perhaps the best thing of all is the myriad ways it can help you develop into a better healthcare provider. From supporting cross-cultural competence to increasing resiliency and adaptability to providing unparalleled experience with global and national health systems, travel nursing gives practitioners experiences that can optimize patient care for generations to come.
We hope you found this article on how travel nursing helps develop you into a better healthcare provider. Have you found that you are a better healthcare provider because of travel nursing? Comment below to share your experience.
Our job board is a great place to search for your next travel nurse assignment. We have you covered with our housing page if housing is an issue. You can search for what you are looking for.
