Trauma and travel nursing leverage

The speaker discusses their journey and goals in nursing. They aim to become an independent contractor and move away from bedside nursing to spend more time with family. They emphasize the importance of gaining experience and learning from mentors. They also talk about their experience as a travel nurse, the financial benefits, and leveraging their previous experience in trauma nursing. They highlight the significance of seeing as many patients as possible to gain knowledge and grow in their career. They conclude by expressing their desire to share their experiences and help others navigate the nursing industry successfully. Getting into nursing was just the beginning for me. Getting into the field made me realize I wanted more from nursing. I wasn't sure about how to go about achieving or getting to the place where I wanted to be, let alone even becoming the nurse that I had seen and wanted to become. On this channel, I'll go through my successes and my pitfalls. On this channel, I'll let you know how I've been successful, hopefully to help and guide you through your nursing career towards your goals and help you set some of those goals to achieve the place that you want to be at and the nurse you want to be. Good afternoon. My name is Kool-Aid Jones. I want to explain why I got into travel nursing, why I want to become an independent contractor, and how I pushed myself into a leadership role. For me, this channel is more of a diary of daily thoughts, activities, and my pursuit of moving away from the bedside. My goal is to become an independent contractor and completely move away from the bedside and spend more time with my family. I would like to continue to help other people, but in another capacity. Come follow me on my journey. Keep tuning in and follow me as I take you down this path that I've never been on and As adults, you think that everyone has it figured out. I think that as we grow in our careers, we realize that others have been in our shoes and are not entirely sure that they've been navigating things as well either. This can lead to an advantage in setting yourself apart from others. When you realize everyone is just as lost as you are, you can leverage that to your advantage. It's very hard to get into anything if you haven't tried to get into it. For some things, it's hard to break into. Once you have, you can find out so much more because of what you experience daily. I started off as a medic moving into nursing as an LBN, then to my RN, and now I'm in a leadership role where I travel and help departments grow. From a professional perspective, I started off wanting to become a trauma nurse. The goal was to be able to handle a trauma all by myself without having to ask questions to anyone. To do this, you have to start off with a preceptor who wants to teach you, and then you have to get them to teach you, or precept you. You want them to precept you as many days or as often as time allows, until you're done with your precepting or until they're not around anymore. Preferably, all the time as much as possible. I say always go with the scariest teacher. Always go with the person that everybody in the department is frightened of working with because they're such a tough person or a stickler. I feel like if you do this, after that, you're going to gain a friend. One, a friend that nobody messes with, and then two, a great mentor. That's what you need in this business is a mentor. It doesn't matter how many mentors you pick up. You just need to catch them wherever you can. Pick them up in fishing nets if you need to. I coupled that by taking as many classes pertaining to trauma as I could. My mom is a nurse, and she's been a nurse for my whole life. And when I became a nurse, I asked her, how do I get more experience? How do I figure out how to have the feeling to know what to look for when I see something? Everybody always described that the patient didn't look right to them. That I just couldn't see it, and I wasn't sure why. And everybody that I worked with, they saw, quote unquote, that person being sick or that person doesn't look right or there was something wrong with them. But I just didn't see it. I just knew the vital signs. I knew that that person wasn't right, and I didn't know why. And I don't think I could see it at the time. And I reached out and I asked my mom. I said, hey mom, how do you gain experience in a short period of time? I want to be the best nurse I can, and I want to be the best nurse in front of all these people. What do I need to do to achieve that? And I was talking to her on the phone, and she told me over the phone, she said, you need to see more people. Your experience level is low. For you to gain a sense or a feeling or anything like that, you need to see anywhere from 1,000 to 2,000 patients. And that means you have to see as many people as you can in the shortest amount of time. So I decided I was going to go work as many places as I could. I was going to work my tail off as much as I could. I was going to do as much as I could to see as many patients as I could to gain as much experience as I could. See, because my mom, she was a nurse for 30 years. Her mom was a nurse for her whole life. And her husband, my grandfather, was a hospital administrator. So caring and taking care of people runs in our veins and it runs in our family. And I want to be the best at it. I want to be known for it, and I want people to look up to me as somebody they can use as a reference. So within that process, I learned all I could about trauma. I had my own personal growth to deal with, and I had to reflect more in my discussions with patients. I shortly began working as a travel nurse about a year and a half into becoming an RN. And I became addicted to working, and moreover, I became addicted to the money I made. The money that you make from travel is... unexplained to many. It's almost exponential, where you can go from contract to contract where you can go from contract to contract just making all kinds of money and figuring out how to make more by saving money outside of the job. Staying with friends, staying with family, staying in a cheap place, renting a room, finding friends, meeting people, networking, things like that. A great, great friend from Los Angeles County got me started in travel nursing. He got me signed to a travel company where I worked with the VA. I didn't think I was able to sign up for a travel company because I was only an 8-, 9-month nurse, registered nurse at the time. At the time, when I started travel nursing, there was a requirement of a minimum of 2 years in your specialty. And because I was an ED, it was 2 years as an RN in my specialty. Even though I had started off as an LVN, working as an LVN in the emergency department, it didn't matter that I had just LVN experience. They want registered nurse experience and 2 years of it. And so I wasn't qualified. I was 9 months, 8 months in, And so I wasn't qualified. I was 9 months, 8 months in, and my buddy got me signed up. He got me signed up working with a company that he worked with. And I was ecstatic. Remember, my original goal was to become a trauma nurse. And I was working trauma at this awesome Los Angeles County facility. But I was finding working a side gig, and when I say side gig, that travel nursing position was a full-time travel nursing position, as well as my county position, where you had to work 40 hours total. So I was working all these days, and I realized that I was doing trauma in my travel nursing contract. And I really wanted to do trauma, and that was the whole reason I had become a nurse, is because I wanted to be a trauma nurse. I love trauma, I love to see those things, and I wanted to help people. After working a few of these contracts, I realized there wasn't a trauma travel nurse position available. It was just the emergency department nursing available. There wasn't anything like that I could grow and move up through, and so I felt a little disruption because I didn't know how to grow, and I was trying to grow myself as a trauma nurse, so I went back to the drawing board and thought about what my mom said, and seeing the amount of patients that she told me to see, and so I just continued to work travel contracts to see as many people as I could. And that was the goal in my mind, is how many people can you see say 20, 30, 40, and how many things can you learn from all these people? What's the trend that you see with the treatments of all these? Are they all the same? Are they all the same with the same demographic? What does that mean for nursing, and how do you take that with you in the future? Using travel nursing to become a trauma nurse is something that I never thought I would do. Leveraging the job experience that I had was probably the best thing that I did, and I didn't even realize it. I used my experience from L.A. County in the ED and trauma against all of their hospitals, and my trauma travel contracts, I should say my emergency nurse contracts. I knew that nobody wanted to work at the county because it was such an awful place to work at because they worked your tail off. I also knew that after working at the county, I'd be highly considered for any other job in the emergency department. I would also be a skilled nurse, and most county nurses are very sought after. The only time you're not really sought after is if you've made a bad name for yourself. But even then, you can move to another area and say you work for the county and still have a great name. The county is notorious for turning out amazing nurses. The county name itself as a hospital is not so great in any county, but they're all known for turning out amazing, experienced, top-skilled, and knowledgeable nurses. I knew that using this would help me leverage my ability to gain new jobs and new travel contracts. When I said about breaking into industries, sometimes they're not easy, but once you get in there, you learn that daily activity and you get daily experience of what happens. Use your leverage to get you to the next place, to push you into the next spot, and to allow you to grow within your own career. Thank you guys for listening. This is my story for today. I hope you keep listening to me to hopefully learn something else or gain some knowledge to better equip yourself with this industry that we're trying to get through all together and navigate successfully. Thank you guys. My name is Kool-Aid Jones. I will be back again tomorrow for some more stories. Take care.