Travel Nurse-title change for its Recruiters to Career Consultants

Travel Nurse- Omaha, NE (PRWEB) June 25, 2009 In an effort to more accurately reflect the service provided by its agents and relationships they have with their passengers, travel health care company Medical Solutions has changed the title of his career Consultants recruiters. In addition to helping Travel Nurse and travel health professionals locate assignments, Career Consultants also help manage their careers and help them during the course of their duties.

Although we are a travel company for health care, we do not see ourselves as an agency. We've known for some time the level of service our consultants provide career separates us from our competitors. With this in mind, this update title best represents the true scope of the service we provide to our passengers

I can not say enough good things about my Recruiter. He has no time for me I needed anything. I think that is what keeps me with Medical Solutions. I also believe that the company really care about their passengers!

"Although we are a travel company for health care, we do not see ourselves as an agency. We've known for some time the level of service our consultants provide career separates us from our competitors. With this in mind, this update title better represents the true scope of the service we offer to our tourists, "said Scott Anderson, President of Medical Solutions.

Medical Solutions' Career Consultants help traveling healthcare professionals to find their next travel destination anywhere in the U.S., matching job opportunities with their career goals and travel. This is only the beginning of their service. Once one accepts the assignment, the consultant works career to care for the needs of the traveler, such as travel arrangements, temporary accommodation, information about the area and continues to serve as your single point of contact for the company. They are willing to leave their way to ensure that each mission is a pleasant and successful experience of solving any problem, lending an understanding ear, or even help find a babysitter.

"I can not say enough good things about my recruiter," said Ruth, a travel RN Medical Solutions. "It was no time for me I needed anything. I think that is what keeps me with Medical Solutions. I also believe the company truly cares about its passengers!"

Medical Solutions has structured its staff in a way that allows the Career Consultants to focus on their passengers. Career consultants work tirelessly to build strong relationships with travelers. Once a health professional begins working with Medical Solutions Career Consultant will be with them during his career with the company. This approach separates spent Medical Solutions from its competitors.

The attention to service by the Career Consultants is just one example of the Medical Solutions places higher importance on customer service. The company also lives and breathes customer service with your client hospitals as well as their internal employees.

About Medical Solutions, Inc.: Medical Solutions, Inc. was one of the first travel nurse and allied healthcare staffing companies to be certified by the Joint Commission and has been continuously certified since 2004. Its focus is on meeting the urgent and short-term staffing needs of its clients with highly skilled allied health professionals, travel nurses and technologists. A nationwide network of travelers allows Medical Solutions to help its client hospitals continue to provide excellent patient care amidst a travel nursing and allied health shortage. Medical Solutions has contracts with nearly 1,100 client hospitals nationwide and is one of the fastest growing companies in the travel nursing and allied health industry. Visit http://www.staffing.medicalsolutions.com/ or http://www.medicalsolutions.com/ to learn more. Travel Nurse

No more nursing shortage

JACKSONVILLE — Alison Carpenter is fresh from graduation at the University of North Florida with ink barely dried on her nursing degree, and she’s realizing the grim reality of entering the work force. She knows that even as a newly graduated nurse, she might not be working as one any time soon. Health care officials say the nursing shortage that has plagued hospitals for years has, at least temporarily, been alleviated.

The recession has prompted many nurses to re-enter the work force while others have delayed retirement. Those employment trends, coupled with staff reductions at many hospitals, have made for few job opportunities for nursing students exiting colleges across the country.

Debra Hernke, chief nursing officer for Mayo Clinic Florida, said the Jacksonville hospital typically gets up to 150 applications for nursing positions, and would hire 20 or “as many new graduates as possible.” This summer, Mayo expects to hire fewer than 10, and most of those will be internal hires of students already working in some other capacity.

Mayo, like many hospitals, has seen a significant decline in turnover as nurses with jobs cling to them, and is staffing as efficiently as possible.

“We are seeing many nurses picking up extra shifts, nurses returning to the work force, and older nurses delaying retirement in an effort to increase their income during the tough economic times,” said David Alexander, president of Soliant Health, a health care staffing arm of Jacksonville-based MPS Group Inc. (NYSE: MPS)

That means the days of soaring pay, hiring incentives and attractive benefits packages that hospitals have used to attract nurses in prior years have all but disappeared. Students like Carpenter, one of 60 nursing students who just graduated from UNF, will have to fight harder for the few jobs that are available.

“There aren’t a lot of jobs,” Carpenter said. “It’s something that nursing students graduating today struggle with.”
Graduates outstrip jobs

Dr. Pam Chally, dean of the Brooks College of Health at UNF, said she knows that there will be “significantly” fewer jobs than nurses graduating this year, a trend she and others began noticing in January. She is advising her new graduates, who might have otherwise held out for the best shifts in a good unit, to consider applying to a public health department or hospice facility, and make themselves available for less desirable night and weekend shifts.

“We’ve really tried to encourage them to be very open and creative at trying to locate job possibilities,” Chally said. “There just isn’t the demand right now, especially in hospitals.”

While students are forced to be more flexible, hospitals have the unfamiliar luxury of being picky about their hires, and are looking for more nurses with a bachelor’s degree and experience working in health care.

Carpenter said just three of her classmates had secured jobs by graduation. Even her year and a half of experience working as a nursing technician for St. Vincent’s HealthCare is no guarantee that the hospital, which has undergone three rounds of layoffs in the past two years, will hire her full time. In past years, a bit of experience might have made her a shoo-in for a nursing job.
Harsh market

Carpenter, who is from Orlando, said she has just two weeks following her licensing exam in May before the lease to her apartment expires. If she doesn’t have a job by then, she’ll have to return home to live with her parents.

It’s a story that can be told right now from virtually any U.S. college, where graduating students are facing one of the harshest job markets in a generation.

Dwight Cooper, CEO of Jacksonville-based PPR Healthcare Staffing, which places traveling nurses in jobs, calls it “the lost class.”

“One big byproduct of this change in shortage is a whole bunch of students will have difficulty getting jobs when they graduate in the spring and summer,” Cooper said. “It will result in some subset of graduates who would have otherwise ended up working in hospitals to end up never working in hospitals. That’s a problem because this break in the shortage will be short-lived. This lost class will contribute to a critical shortage later.”

Industry experts agree. They say that like the last recession, once the economy improves, nurses who would otherwise not be in the work force will leave their jobs. Meanwhile, an aging baby boomer population and declines in students enrolling in nursing programs will continue.

Alexander said Soliant is predicting a shortage of up to 275,000 nurses by 2010, and as many as 1 million by 2020.

“The shortage is a long-term issue because the nurses who are coming back don’t want to work full time,” Alexander said. “We will still have an aging work force, a growing demand for health care and a shortage of nurses coming out of college.”
Tracking job placement

Chally said some of the new nursing graduates at UNF are already considering graduate school to delay entering the work force, and an additional 80 nursing students will graduate in June and August.

In the meantime, she’ll be keeping a close eye on job placement for the most recent graduate class.

“I think the students have a pretty positive attitude about all this,” Chally said. “We’ve had close to 100 percent employment, always. So it will be important as we move through the summer to carefully track their job placement. I really think that in the next six months, most of them will find positions.”