Travel nursing can feel like a bit of a scavenger hunt when it comes to finding resources. The industry still resembles the Wild West in certain ways. This can make getting started very tedious and difficult. Here are a few services I wish I knew about when I was getting started.

Kamana Health

Any seasoned travel nurse will tell you that the most tedious part is filling out a new profile every time you want to apply for contracts with a new agency. Resume, certifications, skills checklist, references. It is a lot to keep up with. If only there was a single service to manage all of this crucial information for you..

Kamana to the rescue.

Kamana has introduced “Sharable Profiles” for healthcare professionals. This means with a single click you can provide all necessary information to a potential agency.

Gone are the days of attaching 35 documents to a single email every time you talk to a recruiter, or god forbid you send a zip file that they never know how to unzip and open.

Take the time to create an account with Kamana, fill out your sharable profile one time, and thank me for all of the extra free time later. 

Vivian

Nursing contracts are the bread and butter of our profession. It’s how you make that sweet cheddar. It is absolutely central to our profession.. But in its current form, contracts are mostly negotiated on a handful of very hectic facebook groups. These groups are hard to search, they don’t filter jobs properly, and you really can’t efficiently refine what type of contract you are looking for.

Vivian has you covered.

Vivian is a jobs marketplace that allows you to search for travel contracts, permanent positions, and per diem work. Agencies post jobs directly to the jobs board where you can search by city, state, specialty, hours, duration and much more. You can also directly contact the recruiter within the Vivian app as soon as you see a job you like. 

If I want a quick cross section of contracts in any given city in the United States, I go straight to Vivian. 

Gypsy Nurse Facebook Group

This one is no secret, the Gypsy Nurse Facebook page is the town square of the nursing profession. At 141,000 members, this is the place to ask questions, get answers, find resources, receive sassy comments, and find friends.

If you are a current travel nurse or considering the profession, it is a good idea to join this group.

Travel Tax

Have you at any point felt like you might be going to jail after filing your travel nurse taxes? Travel Tax is for you my friend.

Between stipends, tax exempt contracts, multiple states, and a host of other confusing tax situations, filing as a travel nurse can be stressful. The professionals at Travel Tax know this industry inside and out. They have an extensive worksheet that asks all the right questions and gets your taxes filed with no stress. They have certainly been a life saver for us.

They also have an excellent blog that answers many of the common questions in the travel nursing field.

Do NOT take advice from your fellow nurses when it comes to taxes.

People have a tendency to give inadvisable or outright incorrect answers to tax questions. Save yourself the time and headaches, go to the Travel Tax blog.