The COVID-19 pandemic exposed and accelerated long-standing pressures in U.S. hospitals. These pressures were particularly visible in the nursing workforce, which accounts for over 30% of all hospital employment (
Bureau of Labor Statistcs 2020). In response to rising demand and staffing shortages, hospitals turned with renewed urgency to travel nurses—registered nurses (RNs) hired on short-term contracts to meet immediate labor needs. Although travel nursing has existed in the United States since the 1970s, it had remained a marginal part of the profession. The pandemic heralded a sharp rise in both the number of travel nurses and the wages they commanded, transforming a marginal practice into a core labor strategy.
This rapid expansion sparked debate among policy makers, hospital management, and in the popular media. Yet most discussions have focused on the concerns of employers. We know considerably less about how travel nurses understand these working experiences and how they integrate them into their view of professional practice. These questions matter as short-term contract work is no longer a peripheral option (
Gelinas 2023). What began as a pandemic-era response has become increasingly normalized, prompting a reconsideration of the assumed relationship between professionalism and tenure.
This paper centers the perspectives of travel nurses to illuminate how contingent roles serve as sites of professional innovation. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 15 RNs who worked travel assignments between 2020 and 2022, we investigate how they explained their decision to travel, what they encountered, and how these experiences impacted their professional values, obligations, and careers. These accounts reveal that travel nursing offered not only economic incentives but a means of reasserting autonomy over their conditions of work and the imagined shape of their careers. By showing how nurses reinterpreted their professional commitments, these findings contribute to a growing literature on professionalism as a dynamic and contested project.
