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As someone who has been both a staff nurse and a travel nurse, the truth is that any anti-nurse sentiment is a poorly disguised distraction
Travelers are the least of our problems.
from the real issue: the consistent undervaluation of all nurses.
Nurses are routinely named the most trusted professionals in America. No other profession has Etsy storefronts dedicated to paraphernalia that help people identify as proud members of the nursing club. Often, leaving the profession without being perceived as a coward or traitor is reserved for the injured or the actively laboring.
Despite all this breathless veneration, the uglier truth is that while nurses are the ones putting their hands on patients and doing the most profitable work, they are all too often mistreated by physicians, abused by patients, underpaid by healthcare systems, and brushed aside by executive leaders. Travelers are the least of our problems.
If you ask most staff nurses how they feel about travel nurses, you will likely get a grimace or lecture about their lack of dedication to the profession.
Travel nurses—experienced nurses who take short-term contracts at facilities distant from their homes for higher pay—are often viewed as opportunistic outsiders who lack loyalty and divert resources away from permanent staff and force healthcare facilities to pay thousands of additional dollars to maintain services and provide care.
This perceived conflict distracts from the actual issue: nurses being undervalued, unheard, and woefully underpaid. Whoever convinced nurses that their biggest problem is with other nurses cleverly shifted focus away from implicating those with the power to create change that will benefit all nurses.
Travel nurses aren’t the problem. The real issue is the systemic need to improve nursing through better staffing, better pay, greater autonomy, and more respect and support—factors that could position us all to improve patient outcomes, staff retention, and morale.
I appreciate those who say that travel nursing damages the healthcare system by forcing bedside care to focus more on economy than empathy. However, I ask my staff nurse colleagues to consider: At what point should you leave a parasitic relationship in favor of one where you are well treated and supported?
Travel nurses are fed up with loyalty to partners who consistently treat them poorly. Burnout comes from a place of giving without the benefit of receiving. Travel nursing attempts to balance these forces while the permanent staff is expected to give until they are angry, exhausted, and used up.
Nurses dedicate their lives to caring for others and do so for little more than an anemic paycheck. Travel nurses do not dim the spirit of our shared profession. They might even help move the needle on staff nurses’ salary increases, growing autonomy, and lifestyle flexibility.
Nursing culture, built on self-sacrifice and empathy, manipulates nurses to remain in exhausting, unfair roles, earning stagnant incomes, often with minimal agency and incentives. Stop encouraging nurses to stay in an abusive relationship with the American healthcare system. Advocate for the system to change instead.
Caldwell is a nurse practitioner, a former travel nurse, and a DNP student at UVA.