I have managed to travel here and there in times of disaster and back fill rosters. Example after I did relief work for Katrina, Acadian hired me as a "temp employee" since so many of their staff were displaced as well. I did a 3 day orientation even then and was cut loose however they ensured I was with FT employees who would keep me out of trouble. It was great though financially, VERY hard physically/psychologically cause I was there to work. I slept in the stations, even when "off duty". I did make a ton of cash though. Doing what I did is extreme and not easy cause you have to adapt and assimilate fast. At that time, I had 9 different state Paramedic licenses active.
that sounds awesome, especially the making lots of money for a short time assignment. I wish i could do that, it sounds like an awesome way to make a ton of money and not have to work part time.
But you were assigned to a FT employee to "keep you out of trouble" so were you more of a warm body with a paramedic patch, or an actual provider? I don't mean to be insulting, but whenever I worked with a new per diem, I know as the full timer, if something happened, it would fall on me. I also knew that if we had a bad call, I'd be calling the shots. I've worked with quite a few "warm body" coworkers; on paper, they met all the qualifications for employment, because they had a pulse and a patch, but if we had a sick patient, I was in trouble.
BTW, I don't doubt your competence as a medic, nor your experience, and I'm pretty sure you weren't going to kill a patient, however after seeing how two different crews can handle the same patient, and document it completely differently, yet both claim to be doing exactly what SOPs say and the boss's expect of them, I question how oriented were our people to the agency standard, and how some of our per diem employees didn't get as much orientation as they probably should.
Too many agencies make on boarding overly complex. For experienced medics that are working a short contract, it should be a fast, intense process.
I agree with you in theory; however, and this might be a new thread altogether, with the trend among several of my local agencies moving toward a more extended onboarding process for all employees (4-6 week academy, formal several month long field training evaluation program, etc), why should an experienced provider traveling provider only need to deal with a fast, intense process? shouldn't that work for all experienced providers?
from a traveling provider perspective, a PA, NP and MD usually have more flexibility (as allied health providers) because they are working under their own license, and as a result, can do what they want (provided they follow the site's local guidelines), compared to a paramedic, who is under the medical director's license, and protocols and policies (both clinically and operationally) can vary state to state, county to county, town to town, and even agency to agency.. I'm not sure how nurses work, but I have heard good things and bad things about traveling nurses (from both the traveling nurse and the people who have worked with traveling nurses). I also wonder how much differences there are for nurses standing orders and acceptable practices from facility to facility.
