To help curb the many stresses and anxieties surrounding the healthcare profession, healthcare workers must do self-care interventions, enabling themselves to prevent illness, and deliver top-notch patient care. Like staff nurses, travel nurses are not immune to nursing challenges — in fact, many travel nurses experience burnout and job dissatisfaction, which was especially true during the height of the pandemic.
In this article, we tackle helpful and sensible self-care tips that travel healthcare professionals can adopt to ensure that they have proper work-life balance, relaxation, and the ability to deliver exceptional patient care.
Make it easy for yourself to find time to relax
It’s hard to find time to pamper yourself when, after a 12-hour shift, you come home to what feels like hundreds of tasks and errands, such as washing dishes, getting groceries, doing your laundry, folding clothes, and cleaning up the house.
To ensure that you can start and sustain a healthy self-care routine, you need to have the time and bandwidth for it.
One practical tip for travel nurses is to purchase and bring a lot of scrub sets (enough to cover one to two weeks’ worth of work), underwear, and socks to your travel assignments. This way, when things get hectic at work and you don’t get to run a load of laundry in a week, you’ll still be covered.
You can also avail of services that will help free up some of your precious time. You can opt for meal delivery services or do online grocery delivery services, which can free up several hours in a week that you can allot for self-care activities. You can also hire on-demand housecleaning services, such as The Maids or The Cleaning Authority. If you prefer to clean your house yourself, consider downloading house-cleaning apps that can help you streamline your cleaning routine.
It’s also a good idea to do food prep on your days off, so you can have ready homecooked meals that you can easily reheat when you come home from work, eliminating the need to cook when you’re already tired from work.
Make friends at work
Nurturing healthy social relationships is crucial when it comes to enhancing your professional experience, boosting job satisfaction, and improving your overall wellness. Having good work friends that you can talk to and decompress with at work can lower the risk of burnout and improve mental health levels.
Being able to connect with your colleagues can bring you joy and improve your mood, but aside from that, workplace friends can also help you get feedback, guidance, coaching, and validation. In fact, a survey found that employees with friends at work experienced 91% greater personal growth and 101% greater professional growth.
Keep a regular schedule on and off work
Create a self-care schedule — one that has realistic routines and rituals — that works for you. Routines can help reduce the feeling of being overwhelmed. It can keep you from feeling out of control and jumping from one task to another without actually finishing any of them.
Make sure that you can incorporate meditation and exercise into your schedule, which can help improve sleep, reduce stress and anxiety, and boost your mood and overall health.
You also need to make sure you set time every day for simple skincare and hair care activities, such as daily moisturizing after taking a shower. You can also schedule a weekly relaxing bath, foot spa, or do a face or hair mask — simple activities that can make you feel pampered and relaxed in the comfort of your home on your days off.
