For those of you who are already working as travel nurses, you know that there is a LOT of pressure to accept or reject a travel nurse contract immediately upon receiving an offer. The hospital won’t wait forever, and many recruiters are quick to remind you of that whether that be truly for your sake or for their own convenience. Either way, it’s true, you’ll need to make a decision quickly once you’ve received an offer, probably by the end of the day.

Sometimes travel nurse positions are auto-offers meaning if you apply and the hospital likes you, you will automatically be issued an offer without needing to do an interview. For this type of contract, you should ideally do your due diligence before even applying because once you do they could potentially send you an offer real quick that you suddenly have less than 24 hours to respond to.

Here are some of the things we make sure to do before accepting a travel nurse contract offer and/or before applying to an auto-offer position.

research the hospital

When looking to apply to an auto-offer position, or after receiving an offer that we like the look of, Dan starts researching the hospital immediately. For Dan’s next contract, he’s been submitted to dozens of contracts which means it’s not realistic for us to research every hospital before even getting an offer. Many of these contracts won’t issue an offer, so we don’t waste our time research them before we know it’s a real possibility.

Some of the things we try to find out about the hospital include the bed-count of the hospital, the nurse to patient ratio, and their exact location. Dan also likes to ask what the majority of his patients will be there for. In order to find these things out, we check the hospital’s website, ask Dan’s agent if he knows, and ask questions during the interview. We also are in multiple travel nursing groups on social media that we search through to see if people have reviews about their own experience working at the hospital.

ask all your questions

Before you get an official offer for a travel nurse contract, you may or may not do a phone interview with someone from the hospital. If you do, this is their chance and yours to ask all of your questions so you’re ready to say yes or no when they make an offer. Otherwise, if it’s an auto-offer situation and they don’t do a phone interview, it can be hard to get in touch with the hospital before accepting the contract.

At this point, your travel nurse recruiter/agent will be the best person to go to with all of your questions about salary, time-off, housing, etc. They may or may not have answers to your questions right away, but should be willing to do some digging and contact the hospital to get you answers. You want to be confident in your decision to accept (or reject) a contract and having the answers to your questions is vitally important for that.

Check the blog tomorrow for a post about what questions to ask during your interview!

check Furnished Finder

We also do a preliminary search on Furnished Finder to see what the housing options are like and how expensive housing is in the area. Like I talk about in my post on Finding Housing While Travel Nursing, there are multiple ways to go about finding housing, but Furnished Finder is typically the best. It’s also the easiest to run a quick search on, which is what you’re doing if you’ve been offered a contract and have only a little while to decide.

For us, if we’re taking a significant pay cut from our previous contract we may be less inclined to accept if housing prices seem far higher than what we were paying previously. Similarly, if there are no listings for furnished apartments that allow pets, we will be much more hesitant to accept than if there were even just a few options listed. That said, we had no potential housing situations when we accepted Dan’s contract in York, Maine. It was a bit of a gamble, but we’re from southern New Hampshire so we were confident we could make something work by using our local contacts.

request time off

If you need (or want) any time off during your contract or have any other stipulations you want to add to the contract, this is the time to bring it up if you haven’t already. Oftentimes, your agent will ask if you want to request any time off before they even start applying you to contracts, but if they don’t or if something comes up that you want to request time off for, you need to do it before accepting a contract.

It is possible to swap shifts and it can be possible to get time off after you’ve accepted a contract, even after you’ve started working the contract. However, it’s not guaranteed just like it’s not if you were a staff nurse. Travel nurses are hired as a kind of last ditch effort to fill a hole in the staff/schedule so they’re expecting you to just work every shift you’re scheduled for. That said, when we were in York, Dan was able to negotiate time off for a friend’s wedding in Colorado. Part of why he was able to do this was because he didn’t actually need any shifts off, he just needed to ensure what days he was scheduled. We were able to fit our trip between two weeks in between his work days.

read through the fine print

Finally, once you have that contract, READ IT CAREFULLY. As we talk about in our post covering Negotiating Travel Nurse Contracts, there is little power the travel nurse has to negotiate their contract but it’s not impossible. We’ve been able to get wording that we weren’t comfortable with changed, as well as adding a two-week clause for any contract changes (pay, termination, etc.).

You would not believe the things that end up in travel nurse contracts. I could go off about this topic because it’s crazy to me how little power and protection travel nurses have, but in the end this is just the way the system works right now. It’s up to you to advocate for yourself and protect yourself as much as you can from being taken advantage of by the travel nurse agency you work with and the hospital you’re signing with. Read through the fine print, ask questions, push for changes that will offer you more protection, but also know that you’ll be severely limited in what you can change because so many other travel nurses accept less than what they deserve. Let’s change this and start making sure we always read the fine print!

what questions do you ask before signing a contract?