The Role of Travel Nursing in Shifting Nursing Practice and Careers

The COVID-19 pandemic expanded both the scale and visibility of travel nursing in the United States. Yet little is known about how this expansion has shaped nurses’ understandings of what it means to be a professional. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 15 U.S.-based travel nurses, this study examines how short-term contract work became a strategic site for reworking core ideals of nursing professionalism. Participants reframed autonomy as a form of professional protection from organizational demands, allowing them to prioritize direct, bedside care while gaining greater control over time away from work. The mobility required for travel nursing fostered new forms of expertise, increased confidence, and broadened nurses’ imagined career trajectories. Rather than signaling a departure from professional values, these experiences suggest a reconfiguration of professionalism that reflects and responds to the pressures of an increasingly unstable healthcare system. By centering the perspectives of travel nurses, this study illustrates how the rise of contingent nursing labor may not simply erode professional values, but instead invite their reinterpretation—even as it raises questions about what is lost when continuity and institutional ties can no longer be taken for granted.