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Being a travel nurse means that you are going to be assigned on medical facilities that need you the most, may it be facilities that are understaffed, places where there are natural disasters, and calamities, and if you work with a nurse staffing agency near Baton Rouge, it would really help you find more assignment. Here is patient care 101: how do nurse staffing agencies help medical facilities in Baton Rouge, LA?

How does nurse staffing affect patient care?

Hospitals, clinics, and healthcare facilities try to keep a certain number of nursing staff to make sure their quality of care does not go down and risk the safety of each of their patients.

  • Understaffing and negative patient outcomes

Fatigue and being burned out are only some of the negative effects that you could go through when you are working in a healthcare facility that is understaffed, which would affect their performance when it comes to the quality of care they give to their patients. Lack of engagement, medical errors, and missed nursing care are only some of the things that would happen understaffed.

  • Understaffing and fellow nurses

More work would fall towards the nurses who are working in the facility, increasing the possibilities of burnout, breakdowns, sickness, anxiety, depression, musculoskeletal disorders, hypertension, and heart disease.

  • Understaffing and patient satisfaction

As a staffing nurse, the satisfaction of your patient is your top priority, and understaffing could affect their satisfaction, and understaffing is a big factor in that.

What are the challenges of working with a nurse staffing agency?

  1. Feeling of isolation

Feeling isolated is one of the most common challenges that you could go through when you are a travel nurse since you are constantly going to have to work in a new environment, having to meet more people in all of the different hospitals, clinics, and healthcare facilities that you are going to work on, in turn, is placed in all of these different situations for the first time, all of which could lead to the certain feeling of isolation.

Communication is key, but not everyone is good at communication. You are going to have to communicate with your peers, line manager, and recruitment consultant so that you could create your own support network.

Having a support system is important when you constantly have to move and live in new environments.

  1. Not prioritizing self-care

Even though your job, in general, is taking care of other people, that would mean that you and your needs would have to take a backseat and you would sometimes have a hard time prioritizing yourself both physically and mentally.

When you are a travel nurse, getting to build your own routine that would allow you to focus on your physical and mental wellness, maintaining a balanced routine, could be hard, which could jeopardize the quality of care you could give to other people.

When we talk about self-care, it could mean something different for each person. There are a lot of sources that you could turn to online to help you create some positive and healthy habits that you could do as an agency travel nurse.

  1. Irregular shift patterns

There are a lot of shifts that you could take when you are a travel nurse, since you are mostly going to be offered shifts where there are not many permanent nursing staff that is working during that time, and that is where the irregular shift patterns come in.

As a travel nurse, you are going to be required to take a bunch of shifts from different ranges, and through agencies od offer you some flexibility when it comes to your schedule (that being one of the main reasons why people choose to be a travel nurse in the first place), working as a travel nurse could be demanding, and many of the jobs that are offered to you are not going to have the same shift pattern, hence the irregularity in shift patterns.

When you understand that not having a regular shift and the importance of having to really monitor your physical and mental health and understand the risk, then it would be able to protect both the travel nurse and their colleagues as well.

  1. Last-minute assignment changes

There could be times where you would undergo unavoidable challenges, and having these last-minute challenges is only one of them, especially when you are working as a travel nurse agency. 

But this could generally depend on the agency that you are working for because there are some agencies that aim to build a great relationship with their nurses and keep their communication open.

If you want to ensure that this challenge might come, block booking is a practice that you could do and make sure that you have a visual of all of the possible assignments that you could have and be assigned at a place for a longer period of time since working on short contract means that you are going to have to clarify some last-minute changes.

There are a lot of advantages when you are working with a travel nursing agency that would help you make your journey as a travel nurse so much better.