Meet HPC’s next honoree for National Nurses Week 2022! Tara Miller is from Drummond Island, Michigan. She’s been an RN for 22 years and just recently became a nurse practitioner as well. Tara’s specialties include critical care, open heart, and intensive care, and she holds PALS and CCRN certifications.

Meet HPC’s next honoree for National Nurses Week 2022! Taylor Cunningham is an RN from Monroe, Michigan. She holds BLS, ACLS, and NIHSS certifications and specializes in the ICU.

Meet HPC’s next honoree for National Nurses Week 2022! Andrea Brown is originally from Toledo, Ohio, but she’s lived in Milan, Michigan for the past 11 years. Andrea is an RN with over 14 years of experience working in the ICU.

Travel nurses are increasingly likely to meet their peers on assignment. Working alongside other travel nurses offers an opportunity to connect over shared experience, and friendships frequently transcend assignments — especially when you support each other through tough times.

Travel nursing anxiety isn’t usually crippling, but it often affects nurses right before the start of a new assignment. Trepidation can make starting a new assignment feel more complicated or overwhelming than it is.

If you find yourself nearing the end of a miserable assignment, it’s important not to dwell. Instead, lift your head up and look to the future. Your next assignment is right around the corner, and it’s bound to be better. Process the lessons of an unpleasant assignment, and use them to grow as a professional. Remember, for every poor assignment, there’s an equal — likely greater — number of wonderful experiences waiting for you down the road.

The more we learn about COVID-19, the more it becomes increasingly apparent that healthcare workers face a much higher risk of exposure — even with appropriate personal protective equipment (PPE). Travel nurses and other medical professionals need to stay diligent in their self-evaluations and make sure they’re not coming to work if they’re showing symptoms of the virus. Travel nurses must safeguard their own health before they can deliver life-saving care to others. Sometimes, that’s as simple as staying home when symptomatic.

One of the best things about travel nursing is having control over your assignments. You can pick where you want to go and when you take an assignment. It’s important for nurses to think about how they want to approach their travel nursing career. Do you want to take a string of assignments one after the other and stay busy? Or, do you need some time in between to digest and get ready for the next one? Neither option is wrong, and both are worth considering.

Nurses need to take care of their health for the sake of themselves, their patients, and their coworkers. That means bed rest until the contagion has passed and your health is back in good standing. Most nurses can take sick leave, paid time off (PTO), or personal days to recover — but travel nurses don’t always have these options. What can you do if you become seriously ill while on assignment?

Few people in the healthcare profession have ever dealt with anything as chaotic or demanding as a pandemic outbreak. For many nurses, it’s simply overwhelming. It’s important for nurses to find stability and treat themselves right during these unprecedented circumstances — for their own health and the health of their patients. Here are a few things any nurse can practice to help stay balanced, focused, and healthy as we fight to #FlattenTheCurve.