RN’s in the nation’s best travel nurse jobs are setting a great example for colleagues and patients by showing their hearts are in the right place. On February 4th many of them will observe “Wear Red Day” to help raise awareness on stroke and heart attack prevention. But every good travel nurse knows this isn’t enough. Throughout the calendar year, it’s important to raise cardiac health awareness and practice what we preach by living an active, smoke-free lifestyle and eating right.

A Travel Nurse Career Makes Your Heart Fuller!

Valentine’s Day has amazing potential for RN’s and therapists in featured travel nurse jobs from coast to coast. Leave your heart in San Francisco in high-paying California nursing jobs, or get cozy for the rest of the winter in New England nursing jobs. Don’t like the cold? Catch a romantic sunset in Florida nursing jobs—no matter where you go on the nursing career path, when it’s with American Traveler you decide the length of your assignment and work closely with our recruiters to find ideal free private housing in the city of your dreams.

If you need inspiration, click on these related Valentine’s Day stories:

• Travel nurse who fell in love in time for Valentine’s Day
• R.N.s who really love their travel nurse jobs

American Traveler wishes everyone a happy Valentine’s Day, and encourages those who crave an exciting, action-packed travel nurse career to call 1-800-884-8788 or apply online today.  Members of our full-time team enjoy top pay and benefits that include free private housing with amenities like gyms, swimming pools and nearby recreation that keep our R.N.s and therapists happy and healthy in all 50 U.S. States! What’s not to love about that?

Did you know…

The Center for Disease Control (CDC) and American Heart Association have acknowledged the first Friday in February as “Wear Red” Day since the 1960s, but it’s just a small part of the war being waged against America’s #1 cause of death. Over 700,000 Americans suffer a heart attack each year and over half of those incidents are recurrent coronary events; while these statistics are sobering, millions of us are heartened to know that prevention is key!

Footnote: If you’re  looking for a comprehensive guide on symptoms and prevention tips, visit the CDC’s Division for Heart Disease and Stroke Prevention. Dietary approaches for avoiding hypertension, as well as exercise guidelines and targeted information for both men and women concerned about heart disease are available through the CDC and American Heart Association.

Spreading the word about the importance of an annual flu shot means you’re in good company with the Center for Disease Control. The CDC recommends that everyone 6 months-old and up get vaccinated. The 2011-2012 flu strain is identical to last year’s, including the H1N1 virus; that means if you were vaccinated last year, you need only receive 1 shot this go around. Click here to find flu shots near you and be sure to post a comment on our Facebook page when you’ve done your good deed for the day!

American Traveler Encourages Flu Prevention Tactics For R.N.s

Some controversy has surrounded mandating the flu shot for medical personnel. Interested Registered Nurses can read about this on a related healthcare employer blog that discusses flu season in America and the waivers some hospitals are willing to grant: if the reluctant hospital staff agrees to wear a badge alerting patients and colleagues, as well as a mask that covers the nose and mouth. As American Traveler has always believed travel nurses need flu shots, we encourage everyone in R.N. and travel therapy jobs to do the responsible thing by getting vaccinated ASAP this Fall.

We don’t have to remind our registered nurses how to stay healthy during flu season, or how to manage the illness if they do succumb. But for refresher’s sake, we would like to offer a few gentle reminders.

A Travel Nurse’s Dos and don’ts During Flu Season:

• Do use hand soap at your work station, in restrooms and at home.
• Don’t go out if you’re sick. Stay in bed!
• Do take a multivitamin, and try incorporating more garlic and Vitamin C into your daily diet
• Don’t stress! The last thing you want is an increase in your body’s production of cortisol.
• Do drink plenty of water and exercise between glasses. It’ll help flush toxins out of your body!

American Traveler’s Flu Season Tips Keep Your Nursing Career in Good Health

If you’re looking for even more flu fighting facts, visit this government website that offers a flu app for your iPhone and other handy features; one of which will track the rate of flu in your neighborhood. Again, we cannot stress enough how important it is to avoid stress, and would point R.N.s who want to relax, toward our travel nurse jobs in tranquil areas with plenty of forests, parks and fields to roam. Call 1-800-884-8788 or apply online today to keep your spirits in good health. Here’s to navigating your way through another healthy flu season!

If you enjoy technology, you’ve often heard “there’s an app for that.” Well, get ready to hear it again. Registered nurses and their female patients will be heartened to know that, now, there’s a free app for tracking the signs and symptoms of ovarian cancer. It is easy to upload, view and work with this app on their smart phone or iPads—just click on the Ovarian Cancer Symptom Diary App to register.

Once that’s done, you’ll notice the color of the app’s interface: a tranquil crystal blue; just like the ribbon for National Ovarian Cancer Awareness Month in May, observed by American Traveler every Spring. Like the OC National Alliance, we’re eager to increase awareness on a cancer that has been called “the silent killer”; yet with as many as 21,000 women diagnosed with this disease every year, we cannot afford to be silent, or unknowledgeable. Please take the time to click on our related blogs about healthcare technologies and gadgets, doing their part to increase patient survival rates in the face of ovarian cancer, and wide range of illnesses.

R.N.s Will Love this Smart Phone App Because…

The stand-out feature on the ovarian cancer app is its ability to track symptoms on the day to day, and get an alert if the symptoms’ persistence warrants a visit to the doctor for further testing. Because ovarian cancer symptoms, i.e. frequent urination, difficulty eating and abdominal pain mimic a host of other illnesses, the app helps women create a consistent and more helpful report for the doctor. Users can create personal risk profiles, email full symptom reports, and update the account by phone.

Get a full tour of the app by watching the video below; hosted by a 24-year ovarian cancer survivor.

Use Your Smart Phone to Apply For A Groundbreaking Nursing Career!

We don’t have to remind our RN travel nurses and other healers on the nursing career path that knowledge is power. Take the short time required to register for the free Ovarian Cancer app today; a few minutes spent there may be worth a lifetime down the road. You can do it all on your phone! Dial 1-800-884-8788 or apply online for groundbreaking nursing careers offering free healthcare as part of a generous benefits package. We have opportunities in all 50 U.S. States! But no matter where you go as a compassionate R.N. or travel therapist, listen to your body and continue caring, just this well, for your patients and yourselves.

According to a 2010 review of nearly 150 independent studies on social ties the answer is a resounding “Yes.” Not only do close friends result in greater physical and mental health, say experts at Johns Hopkins University, supportive relationships help stave off memory loss, reduce stress and boost immunity – all factors associated with aging.

In fact, people with strong social ties had a 50 percent better chance of survival regardless of age, sex, and health than those with weaker ties, one study found.

Meeting new people and making friends is high up on the list of why RNs choose a travel nurse career. Countless have reported falling in love while on assignment and others traveling with soul mates and spouses say the experience is more enriching when someone comes along for the ride.

In terms of physical health, nurses often embark on travel nurse careers to get away from stressful permanent positions that result in burnout, less quality time with loved ones and personal and professional dissatisfaction. These nurses turn to social media tools such as Facebook to post pictures, send notes and stay connected with family and friends on assignment. American Traveler maintains an active Facebook page where nurses and “Friends” log on regularly to share stories and photos.

Doctors have equated the health risks of having too few “good” friends akin to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Others say having no friends at all is worse than being overweight in terms of shaving years off your life.

Close friends keep us sane and balanced. Travel nursing is a way to meet new people and make new friends. If you’re an experienced RN and you’re not already a travel nurse then give us a call. If you’re presently an RN travel nurse and looking to switch travel nurse agencies; some say American Travelers are the happiest around. Call 800.884.8788 or apply online today.

If you have questions about travel nurse careers, Just Ask Kristin, a senior consultant and travel nursing blog contributor who stands ready to assist in any way she can.

Related travel nurse friendship articles

• Friends Make Great Travel Nurse Referrals!
• Travel Nursing in Hawaii with friends

Travel nurses at American Traveler enjoy free healthcare insurance and should take advantage of that full coverage by getting vaccinated ASAP! Plug your current zip code into Take Care Clinics or your nearest pharmacy, where most insurance covers cost. Advise your friends and family that even without insurance, the price of a flu shot runs about $30—a small price to pay when you are guarding against the influenza virus, which factors into an average of 36,000 deaths a year in the United States.

Travel nurses, doctors and patients alike, this is your call to do the right thing. Get your flu shot today!

Unfortunately, in real life, falls among the elderly are the leading cause of both fatal and non-fatal injuries. It is estimated that 30% of people over age 65 will fall each year. New studies show that high blood pressure—a condition more likely to appear in older people—can alter the flow of blood in the brain and lead to falls.

Fortunately, physical therapy is foremost among prescribed methods of treatment and rehabilitation for seniors. Because the elderly represent some of the most vulnerable patients, many of them receive help when physical therapists call on them at home in home health nursing jobs.

Ironically, “home sweet home” can be a dangerous place for the elderly, as over half the falls treated in ERs report they occurred inside the victim’s house. Physical therapists can decrease these grim numbers by counseling their patients, and helping them fall-proof their homes.

Here, we offer room-by-room tips on fall-proofing. In order to make each tip more memorable and something your patients will enjoy memorizing, we’ve turned each suggestion into a haiku poem—because safety can be short and sweet!

The Living Room
Patients, donate your throw rugs!
Make your entire home rug-free
Allow lots of walk space.

Offices, TV rooms & Bedrooms
Patents, is your floor cord-free?
Congrats! You are in top form here.
But, wait. How about the stairs?

Stairs:
For the safest stairs, install  two sets of hand-rails
Keep all stairways free of clutter
Take your time moving

Bathroom:
Patients, keep your night light on
Install rails in the bathtub
Put down non-skid mats

This is a mere scratching of the surface in terms of making homes safe for seniors. Supplement your efforts, by taking a short tour of the patient’s home during home health jobs visits to ensure the safety instructions imparted here are being observed.

Follow up with:

• Helping to rearrange furniture if necessary
• Providing referrals (seniors can always benefit from inexpensive care-providers who help with cooking, cleaning and shopping)

With physical therapists’ help, seniors regain their mobility and independence. Remember what an important service physical therapy provides, particularly in states with dense populations of Baby Boomers. Florida nursing jobs represent the opportunity to work with more seniors than other states. Wherever you go in your travel nursing jobs, physical therapy is on record at the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics as being on the rise through the year 2016.

Albeit home-bound or ambulatory, plenty of seniors are, or will be, in need of your care.  Apply for home health nursing jobs at a travel nurse staffing company today!

As an ER nurse, you probably do know that many of these brain injuries go ignored far too long, resulting in complications, hospitalizations and even death.  To help get the word out about the seriousness of concussions and TBIs, the CDC has launched a Concussion in Sports Web page.

This Web page is loaded with useful information and statistics for consumers — coaches, parents and others — including the basics of how to recognize a possible brain injury or concussion or what to do if a concussion occurs.

But the site is also an invaluable tool for the ER nurses and other healthcare professionals, too. Let’s say you just took an American Traveler assignment for a pedriatric ICU job in Cincinatti, or for a critical care job in Hudson, FL (these jobs are actually available right now!) — and a suspected brain-injury case comes walking through the door.

Well, the CDC site has a handy page titled Brain Injury in Your Practice that helps physicians (and NEURO nurses) “play a key role in helping to prevent mild traumatic brain injury (MTBI) or concussion and improve a patient’s health outcomes through early diagnosis, management, and appropriate referral.”

This page also contains a link to MTBI clinical diagnosis guidelines for four key questions:

• Which patients with MTBI should have a head CT scan in the ER
• Is an MRI more useful than a CT scan when assessing a patient with acute MTBI?
• In MTBI patients, are brain specific blood serum biomarkers predictive of an acute traumatic intracranial injury?
• Should an MTBI patient with a normal neurologic evaluation and a negative CT scan be discharged from the ER?

This is a Web page that should definitely be bookmarked before you head to any more American Traveler ER nurse jobs!  And ER nurses, please let us know of any other invaluable job resources you have discovered in your travels!

Nurses specializing in patient care relative to heart disease are already educated and wonderfully outspoken when it comes to heart disease and stroke prevention.

Are you a specialty nurse that already knows the facts on healthy hearts? Then we hope you’ll skip ahead to our hot travel nurse jobs from California to Florida, in departments like the ER, CVICU, CCU, ICU, PCU and more.

If you’re a nurse looking for RN jobs in the Critical Care fields of Cardiac Medicine and heart surgery, don’t delay! There are so many patients—and hearts—in need of your care!  Read the 5 fundamentals here:

The 5 Fundamentals of Heart Healthy

• Don’t let your health go up in smoke. Cigarettes and other tobacco products are among the biggest risk factors for heart disease; even low-tar, low-nicotine products and second hand smoke exposure can be dangerous. If you want a shot at optimal cardiovascular health, don’t smoke at all. If you need a smoke break, take a walk instead—and spare your body from exposure to more than 4,800 chemicals, which can lead to atherosclerosis.
• Get off the couch. When you’re physically fit, you’ve got a healthy weight to show for it, reducing your risk of conditions that strain the human heart, like high blood pressure, cholesterol and diabetes. Exercise and the endorphins it produces lead to additional payoffs—like stress reduction. Stress and burnout aren’t good for a nurse’s heart! While current guidelines recommend 30 to 60 minutes of daily “moderately intense” exercise, none of the experts are saying that anything short of that is useless. Any and all exercise is good for you—if you’re super busy, break down your work out routines into daily 10 minute sessions.
• Make a mad DASH (Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension). This diet helps protect your heart. It means eating low-fat, low-sodium foods, shy on the cholesterol. The diet is rich in fruits, vegetables (think “5 a Day”), whole grains and low-fat dairy. The old limerick “beans, beans, they’re good for your heart” is true! Legumes, low-fat sources of protein, certain types of fish and Omega 3 fatty acids reduce your risk of heart disease. In DASH, “low-fat” is like a mantra, and specifically refers to limiting saturated and trans fats, which increase the risk of heart disease by raising bad (LDL) cholesterol.
• Weigh in on health and wellness—Almost everybody knows excess weight leads to conditions that court heart disease. Are you overweight? Check your Body Mass Index. Muscle mass is optimal, but spikes your BMI, so athletes are advised to take their BMI readings with a grain of salt. For those of us who have an average fat to muscle ratio, a BMI under 30 is a good rule of thumb. If you weigh too much, focus on bringing the number down. Studies have shown that even a 10% decrease in body weight can lower blood pressure, bad cholesterol and risk of diabetes.

• Let your doctor checkup on you. Annual screenings at the doctor’s office mean blood work, where cholesterol, glucose, thyroid function and blood count rule out or diagnose your individual risk for a variety of diseases. If you can’t make it annually, the Mayo Clinic recommends cholesterol screening at least once every 5 years.

Now that you know about your heart health, nurses may want to check out nursing career resources, where you’ll find more information on relocation, interviewing, city guides, PayPal—basically everything a traveling nurse needs to travel well.

So, that’s it nurses. Embrace more than just your valentine this February. Embrace your health every day of the year, it’s never too late for an ounce of prevention!

Travel nurse job benefits

Since traveling nurses enjoy free private housing, often with on-site amenities like well-equipped fitness centers, pricey gym membership isn’t something to worry about—with health experts recommending up to thirty minutes a day of good cardiovascular exercise, a treadmill just paces from home is a built in perk for travel nurses.

If you’re a traveling nurse with a wellness incentive you’d like to share with the world – well, please leave us a comment. We want to know how your fitness center compares with featured housing offered to travel nurses, and how you stay lean…but not mean. Cheers!