A recent article noted that many hospitals with special nursing needs are scouring the country for qualified nurses to fill temporary gaps in personnel, including some resulting from nurses with COVID-19. The salaries offered are often well in excess of $100,000 a year and usually include travel and housing paid by the hospital. What are the special considerations for a nurse that travels?

Although the article was relevant to the present pandemic issues, “travel nurses” have been a key part of hospital care for decades. There are dozens of national placement agencies that handle the arrangements of having a nurse, for example from Ohio, travel to Seattle to work at a local hospital for a limited period of time. That period may range from a few weeks to many months. So if you ask your friendly bedside nurse where he or she lives, you may be surprised to learn that their full-time residence is on the East Coast, not in Seattle or its suburbs.

For attorneys handling hospital malpractice claims, it is important to determine whether a nurse, whose care may be in question, was a temporary “travel nurse” as opposed to a long-time employee. Every state and, indeed, every hospital, has different policies and protocols for particular care. Temporary nurses who may be very familiar with nursing standards in hospitals in their home state may be behind the curve in learning new ones when they travel to another hospital. Particular procedures in a specific hospital may be done very differently from hospital to hospital, and learning and adapting to those procedures will usually take some time. The new “travel nurse” will also have to meet and work closely with other hospital staff with whom they don’t have an established relationship.  

No matter how educated and skilled the visiting nurse may be, errors in care are more likely for someone in that position. The attorney handling the hospital negligence case needs to dig into these issues in preparing the case. Because “travel nurses” do travel, it may also require making special arrangements to be able to depose the nurse in question, who by the time of the lawsuit may have returned to his or her home state of Texas or Kentucky.

Another issue is often that of malpractice insurance. Many “travel nurses” have such insurance coverage through their placement agency, and many hospitals require that a visiting nurse have his or her own malpractice insurance. So pursuing the hospital case may require actually naming the nurse, and sometimes the placement agency that “employed” the nurse, as defendants so that their insurance coverage is available for settlement purposes. Although the hospital will be responsible for negligent care of a visiting nurse — because the nurse will be an agent of the hospital — it often will not settle a claim involving care by that nurse unless the nurses’ or placement agency’s insurance proceeds are also on the settlement table.
    
 By the way, those same issues may arise in cases involving in locum tenens doctors, who fulfill the same role in temporarily filling physician vacancies. But that subject will be discussed in another blog post.  

Read more here: High Demand for Travel Nurses

Read other coverage of nurses and traveling doctors here: Recent Poll Confirms Americans Find Nurses The Most Honest And Ethical; We Need More Nurses!