Working Nights as a Travel Nurse – Part One
A commonly thrown around travel nursing statistic is that around 75% of contracts are for overnight shifts. If you’re walking into travel nursing with little experience as a nurse it seems to be pretty unavoidable that you’ll have to work nights at least at some point. If you’re willing to be incredibly flexible as to where you go and how much you’re paid, you may be able to avoid it, but again a lot of it comes down to experience if you’re just starting out. There are other factors as well like what specialty you work in and different parts of the country seem to have somewhat different ratios, but in general, most of the positions that hospitals need help filling are overnights.
In this post (part one), I’ll talk about our experience with Dan starting travel nursing and working his first two contracts as a night nurse. In part two, I’ll get into both of our individual perspectives with working nights as a travel nurse, including our favourite and least favourite parts.
As a little caveat, when I share my perspective, I’m obviously not talking about it in the same way as Dan. My experience is as his wife and the practical challenges of being on a totally different schedule than my husband. That said, we are doing travel nursing as a team and most of it affects both of us, so I do talk about how “we” are doing travel nursing and my perspectives on it. That’s how both Dan and I think (and talk) about it.
experience & flexibility are key if you want to avoid nights – our story
Dan had only worked in his specialty (as an RN) for eleven months when we started travel nursing. I think he was actually just two weeks or so shy of a year, which made it quite challenging for him to land his first contract. He had been working as Med Surg/Tele RN (medical surgical/telemetry registered nurse) at a hospital in New Hampshire since a few months after becoming an RN. Overall, he had over a year in experience as an RN, but only his hospital experience in a given specialty counted.
A couple weeks before our wedding he stopped working, and then after that he moved to Montreal where I was living and working, planning to immigrate and work as a nurse there. Unfortunately this fell through; you can read a little bit more about that part of our story here. Anyways, he had a unique situation having worked in his specialty for just under a year plus his six month gap of not working as we waited for his degree/license transfer to come through in Canada.
When we started travel nursing we were less concerned with the where than with the timeline of when he could start work. We had a deadline set by Canadian immigration for when we (technically just Dan) needed to leave Canada so our move date was set and we were planning to stay with family until Dan got a travel nursing contract. Neither of us wanted to make our move not knowing where we were going next or how long we’d be staying with family. For about two months, Dan worked incredibly hard with multiple agencies to try to find a contract pretty much anywhere, but within our timeframe. All of this meant Dan was almost guaranteed to only get offers for night shift contracts which we decided we were ok with, at least for the beginning of our time travel nursing.
Dan’s contracts working nights
Dan’s first and second travel nursing contracts were for nights, but for his third (and current) contract he’s actually working days. We didn’t necessarily expect for him to get a days contract so soon, but we’re extremely grateful! We had a few different criteria/hopes for this current contract, and one of them was that we wanted to see if he could switch to days. We honestly would have been happy with a contract that checked just one of the boxes, but this contract ended up checking two out of three!
Dan’s first contract: South Carolina
As it was so challenging landing his first contract, we ended up taking the first offer we got which was indeed a night shift contract. It was also in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina so we really couldn’t complain, in fact we were pretty over the moon about it. There were SO many challenges with this first contract and in the end it wasn’t clear if they were on the end of the hospital or Dan’s agency, but one great thing about this first contract was that Dan was able to largely make his own schedule and cluster his shifts.
When working days, it’s nice to be able to cluster your shifts (and it’s always nice to be able to make your own schedule), but with nights it’s a MUCH bigger deal. One major thing you have to figure out when working nights, is what kind of sleep schedule you’re going to adopt for the rest of the time that you’re not working. It’s super hard on the body to totally flip your sleeping rhythms multiple times a week. That said, it’s also incredibly difficult to be a literal night owl and have to give up being awake during the day time and all that entails socially.
After playing around with the hours a bit, we ultimately decided that Dan would switch back to a normal sleeping schedule for the rest of the week that he wasn’t working. A big part of this decision was that he was able to cluster his shifts so it meant less back and forth for him. He worked three shifts plus an extra (fourth) shift every other week most of the time we were in South Carolina, so his time was pretty evenly split between sleep schedules.
Dan’s second contract: Maine
In Maine, Dan was unfortunately not able to make his own schedule much at all, but in general they seemed to try to cluster his shifts. It was nowhere near as consistent which was difficult, but he mostly kept to the same sleeping schedule system. One difference was that oftentimes, he would work an on:on:off:on type of schedule so for the middle “off” day he would try to sleep in and stay up late.
Dan found that working nights for this second contract in Maine, was a lot harder in some ways that it had been in Myrtle Beach. He was more used to it in a way, but we were also very close to a lot of our family so he felt like he was missing out on a lot more when he would need to be sleeping during the day up to five days a week. You may read that and feel super confused why he would need to do that five days a week if he’s only working three days, let me break it down:
Like I said before, in Maine a lot of weeks he worked on:on:off:on so for example, Wednesday, Thursday, and Saturday. This meant that he would need to sleep at least somewhat during the day on Wednesday to prepare for that night’s shift, also Thursday to recover and prepare, also Friday to recover from working overnight Thursday, also Saturday to prepare for that night’s shift. On days that he wasn’t both recovering and preparing, he wouldn’t sleep all day. More often, on just “preparing” days, he would try to sleep in pretty late and take an afternoon nap for a couple of hours. Then on just “recovering” days, he would sleep until the early afternoon and then try to stay up until a normal time before going to bed. This definitely cut down on what he was able to do with me or with family, but we did make it a priority to still make some plans or do some fun things together on those days.
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