Cape Bretoner's life as a travel nurse: 'It can be tough at times'

Originally from Sydney, N.S., 25-year-old registered nurse Nicole Horechuk has been living and working largely on the road since she started working with an agency as a travel nurse in 2019.

She had always been interested in the idea, but ended up pursuing it, “sooner than I had intended," she says.

“I was working full time and was getting granted little to no vacation time, so travel nursing seemed like a kind of way where I could get a little more flexibility with my schedule,” she explains.

Now, Horechuk is doing the work she loves, while travelling the country at the same time -- mostly in British Columbia, though she also did a stint in Alberta.

At the moment, she’s on a three-month contract at an emergency department in North Vancouver, B.C.

Horechuk says she sometimes makes a higher hourly wage than permanent local staff and gets money for travel and accommodations, along with a weekly non-taxable living allowance.

But she believes it's not travel nursing that keeps her from coming back, it's the working conditions in Nova Scotia that are the deciding factor.

“To sign on to a full-time position, I would definitely need to know that I can get vacation time if I need it, and I want to say a better wage as well,” she says. “Just being compensated more appropriately.”

Horechuk says she’s sensitive to the fact that Nova Scotia is struggling with health-care staffing shortages, much like the rest of the country.

But she doesn’t think travel nursing is part of the cause, after asking herself the very question.

“Am I a part of the staffing shortage issue being a travel nurse? Is travel nursing causing the staffing shortage issue? And the answer is, no,” says Horechuk. “Travel nursing is not a new idea, there’s a lot of rural communities that rely on agency staff to keep their doors open.”

“I just think that there needs to be more effort on some retention strategies and recruitment strategies to get staff to return back to their full-time positions,” she adds.

Union leaders raised that issue Tuesday at the province’s standing committee on health, as they learned just how much the province has spent on travel nurses in long-term care.

It's more than double the cost of travel nursing in the rest of health care.

A spokesperson for Nova Scotia Health says the health authority spent $20 million on travel nurses from the start of the 2021 fiscal year until the end of December 2022.

Tuesday, the Department of Seniors and Long-Term Care told reporters it has spent $45 million from the fall of 2021 to the present on travel health-care services.

“In long-term care in Nova Scotia we are not funded for human resources,” says Michele Lowe, head of the Nursing Homes Association of Nova Scotia.

She says that means many care facilities in the province are left trying to work on recruitment and retention, “because people are doing it off the corner of the desk.”

“If you’ve got an administrator responsible for doing all those components of HR, trying to recruit, that takes a special skill, we need to invest in resources to build that,” says Lowe.

Lowe estimates getting a stable workforce in long-term care will take at least another two to three years.

In the meantime, she says travel nurses are keeping some nursing homes going that otherwise don’t have a labour force to draw upon.

But Lowe says there have been negative impacts on the sector as well.

“Because we're seeing some of our staff looking at the person working next to them and saying, 'you're making three times the salary I’m making, why am I doing this?'” said Lowe.

“We have certainly seen an exodus in our sector unfortunately, of RNs, and LPNs, and even some of our CCAs leaving to join the agencies and to have what they have described, [as] a more balanced work/life situation,” she says.

Longtime health-care recruiter Melanie Olsen sees that from a different perspective. She started her travel nursing company, Select Medical Connections, in 1999.

Her company provides staff to facilities throughout the East Coast.

“We really looked at this in the last couple of years, it really became the reason, I truly believe, that a number of nurses stayed in the profession as opposed to walking away,” says Olsen.

“At least the thought of leaving home, and getting out there, and helping other people became the motivator for many nurses, where they had perhaps lost some desire to keep going to work every day because it was very grim [during the pandemic],” she adds.

“[Travel nursing] can be tough at times,” says Horechuk, who adds it often means getting used to new workplaces and new coworkers far from home.

But she says until she can get a better balance working full-time in Nova Scotia, she’ll keep on as a travel nurse for now.

“Without travel nursing, I’m not sure I would be able to work at the bedside at all due to feeling burned out,” she says.