When travel nurses continually leave your healthcare facility, it can be detrimental. It disrupts the cohesion of your teams and breaks the continuity of care. Training and onboarding costs increase and patient satisfaction declines. Burnout among your overworked core staff is often the result of travel nurse departures.

Here are a few common reasons travel nurses choose to leave a facility and steps your facility can take to hold on to these healthcare professionals.

Common Mistakes Causing Travel Nurses to Leave

A thorough onboarding process is crucial for ensuring that travel nurses are prepared to work at your facility. Rushing through this process will result in your travel nurses working in a strange environment with unfamiliar procedures. Without support for learning protocols, travel nurses will become frustrated and ultimately leave.

Some facilities expect travel nurses to walk in and immediately perform at an equal level as permanent staff. Travel nurses might be assigned more patients than permanent staff or floated to other areas where they have no experience. These expectations build anxiety and stress in the travel nurse.

Communication and support are reasons travel nurses leave. Being in a strange location likely makes a travel nurse feel isolated. Do not add to this discomfort by isolating the travel nurse at work. It is a real challenge when a facility lacks a mentorship program or consistent managerial feedback.

A poor work-life balance causes a travel nurse to leave your facility. If the scheduling at your facility is inconsistent, lacks flexibility, or does not give adequate time off, a traveler will exit due to burnout.

Solutions for Keeping Travel Nurses

To end this revolving door of travel nurse departures, it is essential that your facility provides a comprehensive onboarding program, sets realistic expectations, and supports through consistent communications and work-life balance. Here are tips:

• A thorough onboarding program. Ensure that the travel nurse’s orientation covers your facility’s policies and procedures and that you properly introduce the nurse to the team. You might wish to assign a team member as a point of contact. Provide unit-specific training for the travel nurse in the unit where they will be working and any technology they will use.
• Set reasonable expectations. Travel nurses will leave when their job expectations are unreasonable. So, try to provide comprehensive information about their responsibilities, patient ratios, and your facility’s charting systems. Workloads must be fair and manageable, and if possible, try to avoid back-to-back shifts when scheduling. Be transparent about your facility’s floating policies.
• Communication. Try to maintain open dialogue with real-time feedback. Schedule weekly meetings and have protocols for reporting issues. If you can, provide a mentor as a point of contact for daily check-ins. And always show appreciation.
• Work-life balance. You can help to promote work-life balance among travel nurses. Try to offer schedules that are not only predictable but also offer adequate time off. Inform travel nurses of mental health resources and burnout prevention strategies.

By retaining travel nurses, your facility can reduce costs, provide better patient care, and provide a sense of stability for all. ADN Healthcare is a staffing agency that excels in matching travel nurses with placements that match their skills and preferences. With the increased job satisfaction this brings, these nurses are more likely to extend contracts. Let the professional staff at ADN Healthcare help your facility hang on to your talented nursing professionals!