The Traveling Kind

Ryan and I are officially settled in our new city. We've really lucked out in the weather department so far, I'm hoping it stays that way till January 2nd. Fingers crossed. Everyone here seems to think it's going to get really cold. Haven't they heard about El Nino!? :) Oh. My. Goodness. The move in to Chicago was probably the easiest in my 3 year travel experience. I've started going through a new travel agency and our housing comes fully furnished down to the silverware-without any extra cost to me! If we really wanted to make it easy on ourselves we could've just traveled with our dogs and our suitcases and been just fine. Going with this new company has definitely been a learning curve. I'll cover the pros and cons of large/small travel agencies in another post. I'm definitely likin' the way things are going so far,  but my momma didn't raise no dummy so I'm cautiously optimistic. We spent our first two days here getting to know our a...

It's been awhile since I've posted anything travel nurse related. I get asked about orientation a lot so I figured I could probably squeeze out a couple of paragraphs about it for the curious. HOSPITAL ORIENTATIONS This assignment is my ninth one. I've worked in 9 different hospitals including Scott and White and I've had to do orientation at each one. They've ranged from a half a day to an entire work week long and that's just for general orientation and computer charting classes.  After general hospital orientation, at most, we get three days of on-unit orientation with a preceptor. Most experienced nurses who sign on staff in a PICU get EIGHT WEEKS. That is a lot of info in a very short amount of time.  So. much. info...so. little. time. There are not huge differences in patient care throughout the different hospitals. Learning the new policies is generally pretty easy, like how to draw blood from a central line or central line dressing c...