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Tis the season… flu season, that is. As cold and flu season bears down upon us, it’s important that your healthcare facility is prepared. That includes your nursing staff, support staff, and patients. But how do you do it?

Here are five tips to get your healthcare facility ready for flu season this year:

#1: Promote Hygiene and Wellness

Encourage healthy practices among your staff, like exercising, getting enough sleep, and eating healthy. While it’s no guarantee against the flu, it certainly helps. Also make a point to share tips with your staff on preventing influenza spread, like disinfecting keyboards, washing hands frequently, and getting the flu vaccine.

#2: Keep Common Areas Disinfected

This flu season, keep a facility-wide plan in place to keep common areas disinfected. Breakrooms, lobbies, and restrooms are breeding grounds for germ-spreading, so evaluate your cleaning strategies to make sure you’re keeping up with routine cleaning and disinfection.

#3: Stock OTC Cold and Flu Medicines

It’s a good idea to bolster your stock of over-the-counter cold and flu medications as the season gets into full swing. Not only is this helpful for your staff if they feel like they’re coming down with something, it can boost morale and lower the chance of employees sharing medication with one another. Cold, cough, and headache relief medicine, cough drops, and basic painkillers are all good options.

#4: Monitor Flu Alerts

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) publishes an influenza surveillance report weekly, which monitors the geographical spread of the flu by state. This can be extremely helpful for determining whether your facility might be in the path of a swell of flu cases.

#5: Boost Your Staff

If you get a sudden rush of patients because of the flu or another disease, it can leave your staff caught off guard and struggling to catch up. You need to have a plan in place to boost your staff if the need arises. That’s where an experienced nursing staffing agency like Medical Talent comes in. We can help augment your existing staff with skilled nurses and medical professionals, alleviating the burden on your core team and helping you to get through flu season successfully.

Trust Medical Talent This Flu Season

Need to ramp up your staff as flu season gets closer? Our recruiters are here to help. Contact Medical Talent today to learn more and get started.

Travel nursing has always been a fairly popular niche within the nursing field. And it’s no wonder why – travel nurses get to see all corners of the country, explore new cities on a regular basis, and work with a wide variety of teams to grow their skills. Travel nursing continued to be popular through the pandemic, as added nursing help was needed in hotspots around the United States.

Although we’re through the worst of the pandemic, it’s still a great time to be a travel nurse. Here’s why:

Job Security

You’ve probably heard that there’s a serious talent shortage going on right now in a variety of industries. Healthcare is no exception. The nursing shortage is affecting facilities far and wide, which means your talents as a travel nurse are in high demand. That gives you job security – become a travel nurse, and you can have your pick of placements where you want to work. Plus, you’ll be exposed to a variety of areas within nursing, helping you to explore different specialties and narrow down where you might want to take your career in the future.

Flexibility

Of course, the flexibility of travel nursing is still a great reason to explore this exciting side of nursing. You get to decide when and where you want to work. You can take as long of a break as you’d like in between assignments, or you can go from one assignment to the next. This kind of flexibility is very helpful if you want to plan your schedule around holidays, vacations, family events, etc.

Compensation

While the exorbitant salaries and huge sign-on bonuses of peak pandemic months are behind us, you’ll still be very well compensated as a travel nurse. According to nursejournal.org, the average travel nurse salary is between $3,000 and $7,000 a week in some areas. That can be significantly higher than staff nurse salaries at hospitals, specialty facilities, and nursing or long-term care homes.

Launch Your Travel Nursing Journey With Us

Thinking of becoming a travel nurse, but not sure where to start? You’ve come to the right place. Medical Talent places skilled travel nurses in top facilities around the country. Contact a recruiter and browse our job openings to learn more and get started.

In today’s digital job market, it can seem like cover letters are unnecessary, or overkill. Why send a cover letter when you’ve already included your resume, which covers everything a hiring manager needs to know? If you have the skills and experience necessary to make a difference in healthcare, why bother with a cover letter at all?

The truth is that cover letters are by no means a thing of the past. They do serve a purpose – an important one. Here’s why you need to include a cover letter in your next healthcare job application:

Cover letters showcase your soft skills.

Your resume covers your hard skills – the technical skills you have that lets you improve lives every day. But any healthcare professional worth their salt knows that these skills are only half the battle. You need to have the right personality, the right character, to really make a difference in a healthcare setting. Not anyone can do this job, and your cover letter is the place to explain why you can.

Ensure that your cover letter showcases your soft skills as well as your technical ability. Explain how your natural empathy improves your bedside manner, how your multitasking skills help you facilitate better patient outcomes for your team, how your communication skills ensure mistakes aren’t made. This is what really sets you apart from the competition.

Cover levers convey your personality.

The way you write and structure your cover letter also helps to convey your personality as a nurse. Because healthcare organizations are looking for healthcare professionals who fit their culture, you want to come across as a competent, likeable, personable professional – not a robot. Let your natural style come through in your cover letter so the hiring manager can get a sense of who you are, not just what you can do.

Cover letters let you sell yourself.

Your resume isn’t a document that sells you to the employer. It simply lists your qualifications to get you in the door. Your cover letter is where you can go beyond that – it lets you explain why you’re a great fit for the role, what you can bring to the organization, and how you hope to grow and advance in your career moving forward.

Looking For Your Next Opportunity?

Ready to put your resume and cover letter to good use with a new job? Contact Medical Talent to speak directly with one of our skilled healthcare recruiters.

Travel nursing is a dynamic, exciting, and adventurous career choice. But it’s not all glamorous, especially as we approach the holiday season. If you’re considering a career as a travel nurse or if you’re heading into your first holiday season on the road, there are some challenges to be aware of.

Time Away from Family

Perhaps the biggest difficulty for many travel nurses who are working during the holidays is spending this time of year away from family. It’s tough to be away from the comfort of home during the holidays, especially if you’re working in an entirely different state or the whole way across the country. And since patients need care year-round – even on the major holidays – it’s possible that you won’t have off work on these important dates. You’ll need to make peace with the fact that your job comes with sacrifices; but remember that you’re doing something good for other people and spending your holidays with the patients who need you.

Travel Logistics

Logistics can be a hassle any time of year, but it tends to get even worse around the holidays as more and more people are traveling. Dealing with time zone changes, unfamiliar weather, adjusting to new places, arranging flights, and more can really take a toll – especially if you’re taking on a new assignment for the first time.

Visit nursing.org’s travel nursing page for a list of online resources on everything from packing tips and tax information to networking hints and certification resources.

Licensing

No matter the time of year, licensing can be a challenge for travel nurses. Travel nurses are required to have an active license for every state in which they work, and that can take a lot of planning. Of course, many states are covered under the Compact license agreement, allowing nurses to get just one license. Note that additional certifications might be needed if you’re hired for a specialty position like a role in labor/delivery or the emergency room.

To keep it all straight, trust an experienced travel nurse staffing agency like Medical Talent to help you on your journey.

Get Help with Your Travel Nursing Career

Medical ’ talented recruiters are here for you every step of the way. Contact our team to learn more about how we can help your travel nursing career progress, and browse our current openings here.

There’s no question we’re dealing with a tough hiring market right now. Call it The Great Resignation, the Sansdemic, the Great Re-Evaluation… the fact is that candidates have the leverage today, and your organization is probably facing a talent shortage if you’re like most other businesses out there. But you might be missing some obvious solutions to the problem.

Here are three solutions to the talent shortage that you may have overlooked:

Tap into the hidden workforce.

Research by the Harvard Business School shows that the “hidden workforce” consists of some 27 million people who want to work and can’t find jobs. These workers are broken down into three categories:

  • Missing hours: People who currently work part-time but are looking for full-time work.
  • Missing from work: People who have been unemployed for a long period, but still want to work.
  • Missing from the workforce: People who are unemployed and have given up actively seeking work but would be willing to take a job if the right offer was presented to them.

The Great Resignation is a real phenomenon – but it’s important to understand that there are still people out there looking for work. So, how do you find them?

Source both passive and active candidates.

Active candidates are those actively looking for work. Passive candidates are those who aren’t, because they’re already employed. And it’s important to source from both talent pools if you hope to combat the talent shortage. According to Recruiter.com, recruitment and talent acquisition professionals have long held a preference for currently employed talent (passive candidates). But just because a person isn’t employed currently doesn’t mean they don’t have the skills or experience to do the job.

Don’t let a preference for passive candidates perpetuate the talent shortage at your organization. Be sure to consider all applicants, whether they’re currently employed or not, when sourcing for your open roles.

Update your ATS.

Research shows that a cumbersome or confusing application process is a huge barrier for most applicants. Outdated ATSs and poorly designed applications only serve to turn candidates off – if they can’t easily apply, they’ll just choose to go elsewhere. And sometimes, the technology itself just isn’t up to par with today’s recruiting needs. Most traditional ATSs rely on keyword filters to prequalify candidates – but keep in mind that all that tells you is whether a keyword appears on a candidate’s resume or not. Go beyond the technology and remember to look at candidates wholistically and consider upgrading outdated technology to better suit your needs today.

Need Help with Recruiting?

That’s where we come in. Contact Medical Talent to find the professionals you need at your organization.