Listening, the most important skill you need to work on.

Video: Suggestions For Your Hospital When Selecting or Working With a Vendor Management Services Co.

HEALTHCAREseeker.com presents video “tip of the month”: Suggestions for your Hospital when selecting or working with a Vendor Management Services Company

HEALTHCAREseeker.com Launches Credential Agent to help Hospitals Manage Employee Credentials

HEALTHCAREseeker.com (an INC 500 fastest growing company) , which provides Temporary Registered Nurse and Allied Professionals to over 700 US Hospitals, has announced the launch of a new sister company called Credential Agent  ( www.credentialagent.com).

Credential Agent is software that will allow Hospitals and other healthcare organizations to easily store, manage and retrieve employee credentials and other Human Resources documents.

HEALTHCAREseeker.com and Credential Agent President, Stephen Halasnik commented on why Credential Agent was developed and how Hospitals will benefit from its use:

“Credential Agent was developed because of our experience in going through Joint Commission (JCAHO) audits for HEALTHCAREseeker.com as well as our experience in credential/document management for our medical professionals. We often have to store as many as 20-30 documents per employee  that include credentials, background checks, immunizations and other documents. A number of years ago, during a Joint Commission audit, the JCAHO auditors commented on our extremely strong skills in maintaining up to date credentials and documents. They felt that HEALTHCAREseeker.com was one of the best companies they had audited and wanted to know how we were able to keep documents well maintained and organized. When we looked closer at why they felt this way, we determined that it was because we had decided to store our documents electronically.  

We then began to visit our client Hospitals to see how they were storing/managing employee credentials and HR documentation.  What we found was the hospital’s process was often outdated and burdensome. It involved using multiple Excel worksheets, with hard copy documents stored in file cabinets and with multiple departments being involved. It was expected that medical professionals kept their own credentials up to date and schedule their own classes for credential renewals. Also, over the years, our HEALTHCAREseeker.com team would hear the stress in our hospital client’s voices when a JCAHO or other government agency audit was due.  To prepare for these audits, hospital personnel had to work numerous overtime hours. Stress levels of personnel were also high because of the disorganization of documentation.

Credential Agent was designed to eliminate all of this. It automatically sends out email notifications to employees well in advance of credential expiration dates; allows for all documentation to be stored electronically thus eliminating document storage costs, and allows all documents to be easily found under the employee name so that many departments can act cohesively. There are countless benefits to using Credential Agent that it really is an easy decision for a Hospital to consider using it.

Lastly, we also looked closely at other document management software and found out that these types of systems were extremely expensive, very hard to implement and don’t really focus on the credentials area.

For a free online demonstration of Credential Agent or for general information, please visit www.credentialagent.com or call 888-331-3431 x 11.

What Can Hospitals Learn from HEALTHCAREseeker.com’s Interviewing Methodology (SCAT) and How Can You Apply it to your Hiring Practices

Over the last several years, HEALTHCAREseeker.com has achieved over a 99% customer satisfaction from the Travelers and Hospitals we work with. What can Hospitals learn from our hiring experiences that you can use in your own hiring of full time or part time staff?

It all started a number of years ago when HEALTHCAREseeker.com increased its workforce of recruiters three fold due to our tremendous growth. We needed a way to teach our new recruiters how to interview candidates so that we were consistently sending high quality nurses/allied professionals to our Hospital client’s.

First, we listened to hundreds of our best recruiters recorded interviews and broke down the process of why those recruiter were so successful at placing people that our Hospital really liked. We wanted to build an interview methodology that was replicable and analyze all phases of how good candidates are selected, so that we could increase our chances of sending high quality candidates to our Hospital clients. What came out of that work was a powerful interview methodology called SCAT that has proven to be one of our most valuable tools we have for quality submissions and a tool that Hospitals themselves can use.
SCAT stands for Skills, Compelling reason, Adaptability, and Trust. In each one of our interviews our recruiters are taught to ask questions that will help determine these key areas.

Skills for us really represents, is the person highly skilled? Our recruiters start by reviewing the candidate’s resume and skills checklist in great detail looking for what the candidate is really great at and what they lack experience in. The recruiter will ask very detailed questions to properly determine if the candidate has previous experience that the Hospital will need. Our Recruiters also ask detailed questions that we have developed to look for red flags. Red flags are areas that the Recruiter needs to dive into more to get a better understanding if the candidate has issues that will make them a problem for our Hospital clients. Our recruiters are taught to respect their intuition and that if needed, to investigate any hunch they may have regarding a potential problem.

If we could put the C in front of the S and pronounce a word like CSAT then we would have done it because the C is so important in the determination, if the candidate will be a good match for the Hospital. C stands for compelling reason. Does the candidate have a compelling reason for why they want to go to our client’s hospital? It has to be more than just money. Maybe the candidate has friends in the area that they really want to see, or the candidate loves to be outdoors and the Hospital is near great national parks, or perhaps the candidate loves the state where the Hospital is located. There has to be a compelling reasons otherwise the candidate may not have a reason to take the job or to stick at the job if things get tough.

In our business of mostly placing Travelers, the A in SCAT is a unique skill set to look for. Adaptability in SCAT comes into play because our candidates are frequently put into challenging situations at the Hospital where they need to adapt quickly. We tell our candidates that they can’t try and change the Hospitals systems and that they need to be professional to adapt to work with the Hospital staff. Adaptability also comes into play when the professional is moving a long distance away into a new environment in that they need to be flexible in housing accommodations or other new experiences.

The last phase of our interview methodology is T which represents Trust. We need to believe we can trust the candidate and that the candidate’s can trust the recruiter and the team at HEALTHCAREseeker.com. What we have learned is that as much as we would like to make a placement, that if we do not trust, the candidate has a higher chance of failing on their assignment, therefore, leading us to spend more time running around trying to fix the problem.

The SCAT interview methodology is only one part of our screening process. Other than using SCAT, another important phase is our reference and background checking. Overall, our SCAT methodology is the key ingredient that ensures that we are sending over quality candidates.

The exact SCAT interview Methodology that HEALTHCAREseeker.com uses may not be able to be used by the Hospitals for your own hiring of permanent employees, but the intent of the article is for you to think about what phases of your hiring and interviewing processes are critical to guarantee that you are getting the staff you want. You might want to consider building your own “SCAT” interview methodology that addresses the critical components of your hiring process.

Let’s face it, when hiring full time staff you often will have problems managing people if you did not hire the right people to begin with. Knowing what you want in your staff and how to go about getting them is critical to reducing people problems down the road.

If you treat your vendors right they will be great partners

Today I had a situation with a Hospital where we had made a placement of a Travel Nurse that had work out great for the Hospital, for the Travel Nurse, for the Vendor Management Services company and for us. The Nurse has been on assignment for 12 months and the hospital commented that they didn’t like Travelers until our nurse came to town.  The Hospital weeks ago decided to extend the contract of the Traveler for another 13 week and signed the contract to do so 3 weeks ago. We then got a call from the VMS that the Hospital wanted to hire the Travel Nurse permanently, that they would not honor the extension to us and that they would not compensate our company at all thinking that they had paid us for 12 month enough money.

This Hospital had no idea how our business works. That once we place a good Travel Nurse that we often will place that Traveler over and over again and that our whole team of recruiters and account managers make thousands of calls to find these type of good nurses. The more important problem was that 4 weeks ago we had many opportunities that this Traveler was interested in  but that we didn’t pursue them any further because the hospital she was at, wanted to keep her. Now the Hospital wanted to cut us out of the picture completely.

The point here is two fold. 1- When a vendor management company gets between us and the Hospital then there is no relationship and having a relationship with your vendors is critical to a Hospitals staffing success. If we knew this hospital directly I believe this issue would have been resolve. 2- When a hospital doesn’t treat its vendors fairly…it will come back to hurt you in the long run.

My company will do anything for our clients. However when our clients are unfair with us or treat us poorly, that attitude of the customer is always right quickly goes away and with that, a good partner that works for both sides.

Registered Emergency Room Nurse, Chrissy Henderson, has been selected as it March 2010 Traveler of the Month

HEALTHCAREseeker.com, a JCAHO certified staffing company that places Travel Nurse and Allied Professionals, has announced that Registered Emergency Room Nurse, Chrissy Henderson, has been selected as it March 2010 Traveler of the Month. She is currently employed at a Hospital in California where she’s earned rave reviews. After returning from Saudi Arabia last year, Chrissy signed on with HEALTHCAREseeker.com and has been on assignment with HEALTHCAREseeker.com for the past 12 months. This award is given to the Traveler who flawlessly exemplifies the type of Traveler that HEALTHCAREseeker.com looks for: highly skilled, easily adaptable, and a great resource to the hospital and patients they serve. Great job Chrissy!

25 Things You May Not Know About What Nurses Know

Throughout the years, nurses have been associated with everything from cute little white dresses and matching hats, the mistaken impression that they have few skills beyond a friendly smile and the willingness to give bed baths, the distributors of medicine to make you feel better, or simply as doctors’ helpers. Of course I’m generalizing as much as the people who think these things are. When I worked as an RN, the “what do you know, you’re just a nurse” patients had definitely become few and far between. So what do nurses actually know? Some of it may surprise you.

1. Science – lots of it: Yes, being a nurse requires a science degree which of course entails a lot of science courses and science knowledge. A nurse’s head is jam packed with the finer points of biochemistry, nutrition, math, microbiology, pathophysiology and more.

2. Accountability: If a doctor writes an order – for medication or otherwise – and it’s incorrect or misinterpreted, and the nurse carries out that order, the nurse is held partially accountable for the error. This is one of many reasons nurses dole out the bucks for medical malpractice insurance.

3. Time Management: Nurses are masters when it comes to managing all the medical, procedural, pharmaceutical, personal and often emotional needs of upwards of 8 patients. Remember this, next time you’re in the hospital and it takes your nurse that extra minute to answer your call light.

4. How to lead a team: Just like Phil Jackson can pull together the Lakers and make sure everyone does their job and plays well together, a nurse is responsible for making sure their patients are getting everything they need from their care team (doctor, nutritionist, social worker, physical therapist, etc.).

5. Advocacy: When nobody else is there to speak for the patient – whether for long term care needs after leaving the hospital, home health services or further rehabilitation – the nurse is trained to step in and be their voice.

6. Thick Skin: When part of the nurse’s job is to wake doctors up from a sound sleep in the middle of the night (often after they’ve been awake for several days) – tact and a thick skin become vital. These qualities also apply to daily encounters with patients, their families and other hospital departments.

7. Stand Up Comedy: Laughter truly can be the best medicine when it comes to cheering up patients or breaking the ice with their family and friends. Nurses have quite a few tools in their “bag of tricks” and have a knack for using the right one at the right time.

8. How to be in nine places at once: Nurses don’t need any Star Trek technology to seemingly be in all their patients’ rooms at the same time. It’s all about mastering the act of juggling with finesse – and really comfortable shoes.

9. Drug Dealing: This is where all those math skills come in, because if one decimal point in the medication dosage calculation goes awry, a patient’s life could be in danger. The average nurse has an impressive bank of information about hundreds of different drugs, their most common dosages, side effects and more.

10. Delegating: Registered nurses (RNs) in particular often oversee license practical nurses (LPNs), certified nurse’s aides (CNAs) and even nursing students during a typical shift. The ability to apply critical thinking and decide which individual is best for which task is a mission critical skill.

11. Customer Service Skills: It may not seem like it sometimes, but health care is a business, the patient is a customer and since the nurse has the most direct and frequent contact with the patient, customer service is key to the job.

12. Patient Teaching: Once the doctor gives his or her medical spiel and leaves the room, the patient (and their family) often looks to the nurse to answer questions, fill in the blanks, reiterate the most important parts and generally break it all down layperson’s style.

13. Alternative/Holistic Medicine: They may technically work in the west, but nurses are trained in many of the essentials of eastern and other types of “alternative” medicine.” These may include everything from acupuncture, herbs, and chiropractics to music therapy, massage, and biofeedback

14. They can “feel your pain”: Nurses are extensively trained in assessing and managing a patient’s pain. They have the skills to observe whether a patient is in pain based on breathing, vital signs, gestures and facial expressions, without the patient ever saying a word.

15. Accessorizing: In the movie ‘Office Space’ servers at a family restaurant learn the important of “flair” – fun, colorful buttons tacked onto their otherwise uniform uniforms. Nurses have the same instinct, adding colorful jewelry and vests to their whites and selecting colorful scrub tops that fit their personality – all in good taste of course.

16. Improvising: Believe it or not, there isn’t always a medical device or procedure for every single that can happen with patients during a shift. As a nurse, I saw remarkable examples of creative problem solving by my colleagues (I was even known to do a little bit of it myself).

17. How to switch gears quickly: A nurse may have their entire shift organized at the beginning, by which patients need what and when. This plans usually lasts for about fifteen minutes. One new post-operative patient or another patient having a sudden crisis, and these patients become the new focus of the shift, while the nurse still attempts to juggle everything else in the original plan. This goes well beyond the definition of multi-tasking.

18. The infamous poker face: The rule of thumb is – even if you haven’t seen it all yet, pretend you have. No, nurses are not supposed to be unfeeling robots. However, they are able to keep their composure in the face of stressful situations enough to hold their own against the stony faced competitors in a poker tournament.

19. Handwriting interpretation: Yes, with electronic medical records, the classic issue of figuring out what the doctor actually meant to write on the patient’s chart is less of a problem. But the reality is, as long as the human beings are doing the care giving, and not the computers, a certain amount of a nurse’s job will involve deciphering a doctor’s hasty scribbles.

20. Learning new machines at the speed of light: Medical technology is moving faster than patients can find new ways to get sick. Therefore, most of a nurse’s training on machines like IV pumps, feeding tubes, heart monitors and other gadgets, comes after nursing school, on the job and quickly.

21. Writing: Ever wonder why so many nurses become bloggers (he-hem), authors of research studies and books, and journalists? Between countless nursing care plans in nursing school (a detailed plan of care for each patient), research papers and nursing notes, nurses have no choice but to develop a working passion for the written word.

22. Research: Contrary to the beliefs of many, nursing is about much more than simply following doctor’s orders and treating patients. Nurses, RNs especially, are expected to have an understanding of why they are doing what they’re doing; the intended effect on the patient and how to know if something has gone wrong. This means keeping up with the latest medical research studies and newest data in the field of health care.

23. Cutting through the media healthcare hoopla: As we learned in nursing school, the average mainstream newspaper story may get those all important numbers right from the latest New England Journal of Medicine study, but the actual health implications for patients? That’s a different story.

24. Speed reading: This is an academic survival skill picked by nurses back in nursing school just to get through the sheer volume of required science and clinical reading. Yikes – think I just had a flashback of those 10 pound textbooks!

25. Astute powers of observation: Along with pain assessments, nurses are trained to look for the little details that come from seeing the patient more than any other caregiver – color, changes in vital signs, mental status and much more.

Essentially, the individual in those nurse’s whites is a CEO, customer service manager, crisis coordinator, and medical professional all rolled into one. Be sure and thank a nurse next time you have the opportunity – we need them!

Do Travel Nurses Cost a Hospital more than Existing Staff?

By Stephen Halasnik, President, HEALTHCAREseeker.com

We hear it from Hospitals often that the hospital is trying to reduce their staffing expenses so they don’t want to use Travel Nurses. We always took this as a fact, but I finally had a chance to run a cost analysis.

Amazingly enough; the numbers showed that in fact, a Traveler costs about the same or maybe even less than a full time staff nurse and that one of the key reasons why has to do with vacation and sick time.

Let’s take a scenario where a full time staff nurse is given 3 weeks’ vacation and 8 sick days for a total of 23 days off. When that nurse takes vacation/sick days there are other salaried nurses that need to be brought in to cover the nurse’s shift. That means that the Hospital is still paying for that nurse while another of full time staff nurse is covering the shifts. If one takes those 23 vacation/sick days x 12 hour shifts x $66 (cost of the nurse per hour-see chart below)= $18,216. That $18,216 is the difference as to why a Travel Nurse may actually costs less for a Hospital to use then permanent staff.

I am certainly not advocating that a Hospital should have all Travel Nurses. It is the full time staff that gives your Hospital its culture, personality and unique patient experience but I believe the numbers show that Travel Nurses are not more expensive than full time staff and your decision to use Traveler or not, should not be a cost decision.

Full time staff nurse costs

Cost per hour
Salary $35
Medical, dental, life 7
Social sec + unemployment 4
Workers comp insurance, liability and Malpractice 4
Other benefits: 401k match, tuition, etc 3
Recruitment costs, sign on bonuses, orientation 4
Vacation/sick days/holidays ( 23 days) 9
Total cost for a full time staff nurse $66
Travel Nurse typically costs a Hospital $55-$65 per hour

Conclusion: A Travel Nurse and a full time Staff Nurse cost the same

*If you are paying your Staff Nurses less than $35/hr then Traveler rate is more than likely closer to $55/hr.

HEALTHCAREseeker.com is a JCAHO gold certified Travel staffing company and over the last 10 years, has been the #1 fastest growing Travel Nurse Staffing company according to INC Magazine and Staffing Industry Analysts. HEALTHCAREseeker.com has over 700 Hospital contracts throughout the US and consistently has a 100% customer satisfaction rating. It’s commitment to its Hospital clients is that we will be the best agency at matching our Nurses to your needs resulting in a positive patient and staff experience. If you would like informative staffing news, please visit our blog at www.travelstaffingnews.wordpress.com.

What do you want?

For the past 8 years of working at HEALTHCAREseeker.com,  I find myself always trying to get inside the heads of my hospital clients to make sure I’m getting them the right travel nurse every time.  I’ve had many more successes than failures,  largely due to my best clients giving me great information about what they REALLY need.    

Well, now I’m looking for more information from you.   I’m hoping that through this blog, you can help me improve my skills as well as the skills of the rest of the team here at HEALTHCAREseeker.com.  You’ll obviously benefit too as the mission will be to really understand what we need to do to save you time in changing how we work with you.  Each week, I’ll be throwing out questions to get to know what a hospital really wants from their travel nurses & their agencies.  If you would like to send comments or questions that are unrelated, you can do that too and I’ll respond. 
This week’s questions are: 

1. What do you wish all travel nurse staffing companies knew that would make your job a LOT easier and would save everyone’s time? 
2. What are some things your favorite travel nurse company does that you wish all others would do as well? 
3. What mistakes do you see companies make that take up most of your time?

 Thanks in advance for your help!

About the author: Christina Verduchi has been working as a Senior Healthcare Recruiter at HEALTHCAREseeker.com for the past 8 years.  In her spare time she loves to travel, craft, cook, and spend time with her husband and two dachshunds.

How To Make Shift Work Family Friendly

Listen to NPR: http://www.npr.org/templates/player/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=124710748&m=124758583

March 17, 2010

On Aug. 10, 2005, Vickie Underwood was nearing the end of her shift, overseeing the production run at a printing plant near Atlanta.

“At the time, I had been working at the plant for over 22 years with an unblemished work record,” she says.

When she got off at 3 that afternoon, Underwood needed to hurry home to register her kids at two different schools and sign up the youngest for aftercare. The county was holding a one time all-day registration, 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., to accommodate working parents — which is ironic, considering what happened at 2, with an hour to go in Underwood’s shift.

“I was asked to work three hours mandatory overtime. I mentioned to them that I had to register my kids for school, and they told me that I couldn’t leave,” Underwood says.

Underwood had worked last-minute overtime dozens of times before, but on this day she said no. Since school registration is mandatory, she didn’t really think she’d get in trouble. In fact, her bosses skipped right over any disciplinary measure and fired her. Underwood says her family was devastated and dumbfounded.

“My family was like: ‘Huh? How could this happen?’ And it was almost like, ‘No, they had to fire her for something other than her kid,’” Underwood says. “No one wanted to believe that’s what I was actually fired for.”

Underwood fought a year without pay before finally getting her job back, and she was lucky to have a union backing her up.

More In This Series

PART 1: Some Employers Make Room For Work-Life Balance March 15, 2010

PART 2: The End Of 9-To-5: When Work Time Is Anytime March 16, 2010

ESSAY: Can Working Moms ‘Have It All’? Ha! March 14, 2010

SIDEBAR: Options On The Flex-Work Menu March 14, 2010

‘There’s A Lot Of Flexibility … It’s Called Quitting’

Work-life experts say cases like Underwood’s happen a lot because of the unpredictability so many low-wage and hourly workers face: schedules posted just days in advance, rotating schedules, unexpected overtime some days, while other days they can show up only to be told business is slow, they should go back home — without pay.

“I always say, there’s a lot of flexibility in those jobs, but it’s called quitting,” says Joan Williams, head of the Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California.

While much of the focus around job flexibility has centered on an elite cubicle culture who can work from Starbucks on their laptops, Williams says low-wage workers often need it more. First, they actually have to be at the store, hospital or factory. What’s more, a disproportionate number are single moms, yet wildly variable schedules mean they essentially have to be on-call at-will.

“We’re certainly familiar with this at the top of the income heap with executives, investment bankers and lawyers,” Williams says. “But a recent study showed that even for minimum-wage jobs, employers put a premium on someone who says, ‘I’m always available.’”

Getting A Little Understanding From Managers

Enlarge Jennifer Ludden/NPRTina Stachowicz is the customer service manager at the Family Fare grocery in Bryon Center, Mich. During a flexibility training program, she noted each time she said hello to employees, asked about their family or changed the schedule to accommodate a personal conflict.

Jennifer Ludden/NPRTina Stachowicz is the customer service manager at the Family Fare grocery in Bryon Center, Mich. During a flexibility training program, she noted each time she said hello to employees, asked about their family or changed the schedule to accommodate a personal conflict.

So in today’s 24/7 economy, can a low-wage workplace be family-friendly?

“Every job, even an hourly job, can have some flexibility,” says Ellen Kossek of Michigan State University.

She’s helping conduct a National Institutes of Health study that’s taking on the hardest cases for flex work. Kossek believes the key is making sure that managers understand what their employees are up against, and she used a chain of Michigan grocery stores to test her theory.

In half the stores, she had managers watch a video on flexibility, then asked them to keep a notebook and mark down each time they said hello to their staff or solicited information about personal conflicts with work.

“We’d have one question, if you’re asking about their family,” says Tina Stachowicz, a customer service manager who participated. She says she also asked about “sporting events with the younger ones, because a lot of them are in sports. How’s school going, that type of thing.”

Can Flexible Work Make You Healthier?

When you search for risk factors for cardiac disease, obesity or any number of ailments, you likely won’t see “your job” listed in any medical manual. But Lynne Casper, a sociologist at the University of Southern California, believes the link should be obvious.

“Our lives have sped up,” she says. “We don’t have down time. This is a public health issue.”

A few years ago, when Casper was at the National Institutes of Health, she helped launch a wide-ranging study to explore the health impact of flexible work — or lack of it. Researchers surveyed employees at Best Buy headquarters, which had implemented an aggressive flexible work program, and also at grocery stores, hotels and nursing homes. They asked who had the most accommodating managers and matched that information against a range of health measures. Lisa Berkman, a social epidemiologist at Harvard University, says the results were striking.

Employees with the most rigid managers “had about a two-fold risk of having two or more cardiovascular risk factors. And the amazing thing was that they slept about 30 minutes less per night than people whose managers were more open and creative.”

One study also included family members of employees. It found that on days when a parent reported a work conflict with a manager or co-worker, their children had a higher level of cortisol, an indicator of stress.

The NIH is now expanding its study, conducting research at a telecommunications company and a chain of nursing homes. Berkman says the results could show that “how work is designed causes poor health. And that has implications for businesses and their bottom line.”

Managers were also asked to be role models, so they’d talk about leaving work early themselves to see a child’s school play, for example. Researcher Kossek says such small things can have a big impact.

“If you work for a workaholic or someone who acts like they don’t have a family, you feel reluctant to talk about your own personal needs,” Kossek says.

The managers would also note each time they helped someone resolve a conflict, perhaps by switching around the schedule.

Good For Workers And Employers

The NIH wanted to know whether this kind of flexibility at work can improve employee health, so they matched manager flexibility against various measures of employee well-being. Kossek says those with the most accommodating managers “had better physical health reports, better sleep quality, higher job satisfaction, and less stress over work-life conflicts.”

The NIH researchers are expanding their study to a group of nursing homes, hoping to convince companies it’s in their best interest to be accommodating and that it’s just not that hard.

Kossek says it could mean posting schedules farther in advance, making it easier for workers to trade shifts or cross-training more people for the same job — or simply easing rules on cell-phone use.

A five-minute break would allow a cashier to call her child “even if it wasn’t when her official break was, but when she knew the bus got home,” Kossek says.

At a Family Fare grocery south of Grand Rapids, Mich., Tina Burgess worked part time for 13 years, juggling her hours around raising two young boys. Shortly after she took part in the flexibility study, a full-time front office job opened up. Burgess wanted the benefits that came with that job, but there was a problem: it started at 5 a.m. Her husband left for work at 5:30, so Burgess needed to be home to get her children to school. Her manager worked it out.

Making It Work

These days, Burgess does start work at 5 in the morning, counting up sales from the day before and readying the cash registers for the day ahead. Her teenage sons keep their cell phones on their pillows, and every morning at 7 she calls to wake them.

One day earlier this year, Burgess has to call her son Aaron a few times. “He went snow boarding yesterday, so he’s probably wiped out,” she says, shaking her head with a smile. She tries her other son, and a sleepy-sounding Jordan picks up. “Hey, mom.”

Enlarge Jennifer Ludden/NPRTina Burgess opens the front office at 5 each morning at the Family Fare grocery in Byron Center, Mich. About two hours later, she returns home briefly to help her two sons get ready for school.

Jennifer Ludden/NPRTina Burgess opens the front office at 5 each morning at the Family Fare grocery in Byron Center, Mich. About two hours later, she returns home briefly to help her two sons get ready for school.

“Hey, Aaron’s not answering his phone so you wanna get him up?” Burgess asks.

Burgess starts brewing the complimentary coffee just inside the front doors, checks in with a colleague, and at 7:15 heads out for the short drive home.

At the house, the sleepy boys gather their things in the living room while Burgess packs lunches and hands out after-school spending money. Then, with a quick “I love you,” she’s back out the door.

Burgess used to take the boys to school, but her oldest recently got his license. As she drives back to work, she muses that they could probably manage without her now. Still, she says this small ritual is important to her.

“Sometimes in the morning, I get a feel for if it’s going to be a bad day,” she says. “Maybe they want to say something before they go to school. If I wasn’t there, they wouldn’t be able to.”

What do Hospitals expect from Travel Nurses

I just got out of a meeting with all of my Recruiters and Account Managers. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss better questions that we need to be asking in regards to our mandatory reference checks. I felt that our team needed to ask more details questions earlier on in our interviews relating to what the last two managers in the last two years would say about the Traveler. It is called the threat of reference. The idea is that asking someone for references earlier instead of later would better help our Recruiters determine if the Traveler would be a good nurse instead of waiting for the mor formal reference check to be done by our HR department.

I have always felt that our HEALTHCAREseeker.com interview methodology called SCAT ( Skills, Compelling reason, adaptability, Trust) was a huge differentiator in our ability to place quality Traveler into assignment that results in a Rewarding Travel Experience for all. I have rarely found another agency that has a process such as ours and that spends as much time discussing what to look for in the answers.

In that meeting, our team went back over what we felt Hospitals wanted from its Travelers. We have addressed this question before and sometimes, I like to go back at the same question again so that my team 1-remembers the answers and/or 2-gets some new insights into our Hospital customer.

The answers to the question of what Hospital expect from Travelers came down in our opinion to, 1- The Taveler gets along with the existing staff and doesn’t cause any problems, 2-That the Traveler shows up for work and doesn’t miss any shifts, 3- That the Traveler is highly skilled in dealing with the patients.

2 of the 3 answers above relate to the Travelers personality and as such, are subjective. It is the key reason why our team needs to make sure that our Travelers have had good references from past employers.

As a Hospital, do you agree with this blog?