Travel nursing is a fast-paced field where you have to be prepared to act without too much of a chance to ask questions. As I talked about in my post about What to Do Before Accepting a Travel Nurse Contract, there is a lot of pressure to very quickly decide whether to accept a contract offer or not. It’s important to be as resourceful as possible when it comes to getting your questions about a contract or hospital answered. Similarly, it’s important to be prepared if and when the opportunity comes up to ask your questions, for example, in a travel nurse contract interview.

Your agent is always there to help answer your questions, but they may not have the answers or be able to get them before you’re required to make a decision on a contract offer. The best chance travel nurses get to have their questions answered (concerning the hospital, the actual job they’ll be doing, etc.) is the travel nurse contract interview. Now, some hospitals will send out auto-offers where if you accept you’re hired, no interview necessary (and no interview possible). That said, if you get the chance to interview it’s not only your chance to market yourself to the hospital, but also to ask all of the burning questions you have about what the contract will look like.

In this blog post I’ll cover some of the most important questions to ask during your travel nurse contract interview.

1. Nurse to Patient Ratio
2. Beds on Unit
3. Units You May Be Floated To
4. Scrub Colour
5. Frequent Diagnoses
6. Documentation System
7. Resources the Hospital Has
8. How Scheduling Works

1. Nurse to Patient Ratio

Probably the most important question to ask in your travel nurse contract interview is what the nurse to patient ratio is for the unit that you’d be working on. This is at least one of the most helpful questions when it comes to deciding whether or not you should accept the contract. Nurse to patient rations are only going up unfortunately due to the shortage of nurses (and management that is increasingly removed from the boots on the ground work).

Keep in mind to ask about how many aides there are for the floor as well. This will help give you an idea of if you’ll be totally on your own when it comes to caring for your patients, or if you may have some help. If you’re given a range for the nurse to patient ratio, it’s always good to assume that most if not all days will be on the high end of the range. For example, if you’re told that typically the ratio is one nurse to six patients but in crisis it can go up to eight, assume that you’ll have eight patients every day. You probably will.

2. Beds on Unit

This goes hand in hand with the nurse to patient ratio and the number of aides on the floor. If there are five aides on a floor that has 24 beds, that’s amazing. However, more likely there would be less than five aides (maybe two) on a floor with 40+ beds. The more beds on the unit, the more chaotic things will be and the more other nurses/staff you’ll be working with. The larger the unit the busier (and less available) your charge nurse will be as well. All that to say, it can be helpful to know how many beds are on the unit you’re potentially going to be working on to get an idea of how busy you’ll be and how much support you’ll have.

3. Units You May Be Floated To

You don’t necessarily need to know what units you may be floated to, but it can be nice to know. Depending on your perspective, it may be intimidating to find out that you will likely be floated to a Psych floor, or it may seem like an exciting opportunity. While working as a travel nurse, Dan has been floated to floors including Med Surg Neuro, Telemetry, PCU, Surgical Step Down, ER, Ortho, Trauma, Oncology and more. So far while travel nursing, he’s only had Med Surg contracts, but is hoping to branch out to Telemetry or potentially Progressive Care.

4. Scrub Colour

This one is pretty self-explanatory and can be surprisingly difficult to find out. Dan has forgotten to ask about this before (or not had an interview so he didn’t have an opportunity to ask) which left us scrambling last minute trying to figure out what colour scrubs he needed for his first day. It can be surprisingly difficult to get in contact with someone at the hospital who knows what colour scrubs you’ll need, especially if your agent fails to get you a contact person at the hospital ahead of time. We’ve found that the employees at Scrubs & Beyond sometimes know, or you may run into other nurses there who can confirm as well.

5. Frequent Diagnoses

Similar to what units you may be floated to, this is another personal preference/nice to know piece of information that you can ask about during your travel nurse contract interview. It gives you a picture of the floor and the type of patient population you’ll be caring for. For example, if you’re going to be treating a lot of patients with broken bones the focus will be largely on rehab and pain management. If you’re going to be treating a lot of patients who have pneumonia, your focus will be on oxygen management and antibiotics.

6. Documentation System

It’s extremely helpful to know what documentation system the hospital uses. If you don’t get the chance to interview (for an auto-offer situation), then ask your agent and/or do research online to see if you can find it listed somewhere. As I’m sure you know, a HUGE part of nursing is documentation (fortunately or unfortunately) and not all documentation systems are created equally.

Whether you have experience with whatever documentation system the hospital uses or not will determine if you have to do their training for it. This training can be incredibly intensive, time consuming, and may or may not be paid (it should be at least partially paid). Not that this should determine whether you take the offer or not, but it’s nice to know walking into it if you’ll have to add documentation system training to the already extensive onboarding process.

7. Resources the Hospital Has

Knowing what resources the hospital has will help you to understand what you’ll have access to as well as what is your responsibility during your shift. Some helpful questions to ask within this category are:

• Does the hospital have a code team?
• Does the hospital have an IV team? Are they responsible for doing central line dressing changes or are you?
• Do they have a dedicated resources nurse who you can ask questions to or ask for assistance?
• Does the hospital have LPNs? What do they do? Are they generally assigned to a floor or specifically to a nurse? (They may be a part of a team nursing model that informs their nurse to patient ratio)
• Does the hospital have phlebotomists or are the nurses responsible for drawing blood? (This is rare, but Dan did work at a hospital that didn’t have a phlebotomist)
• Does the hospital have a wound team? Do they do routine dressing changes or just the initial?
• Will there be a break nurse? (This seems to only be a thing in California)

8. How Scheduling Works

This is another question who’s answer you may want to take with a grain of salt. It really varies from hospital to hospital whether or not you’ll have any control over your schedule as a travel nurse. In general, you’re the bottom of the food chain and priority list as a travel nurse, so you should probably go into it expecting to have no control over your schedule. Dan has had varying degrees of control and consistency when it comes to his schedule depending what hospital he’s working at. In general, he hasn’t had much control over his schedule, but he’s also found that most of the time it’s not too difficult to switch days occasionally.

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It will be tempting to ask more specific-to-you questions like when will your first day be, what will your hours look like the first week, but you probably won’t be able to get answers to questions like this until you actually have the contract. Even if they did have an answer, it would be wise to take it with a grain of salt, because especially in travel nursing, anything can change at a moments notice and you’ll be expected to go with it. Your agent should be prepared to help you find answers to these questions, but oftentimes you’ll have to wait a while before finding out the details of what your first week will look like. Typically, Dan hasn’t found out his orientation week schedule until days before they expect him to come in for his first day, which thankfully is usually just a short paperwork-centered day.

what questions do you make sure to ask during travel nurse interviews?