Nursing as a Community

Nurses love to be part of a community. One of the places I used to work at was really great at fostering that sense of community. Sometimes we refer to it as being part of a “family”. It seemed like at least once a month we would have a potluck. I don’t know about you but I love potlucks. It’s better than going to a buffet restaurant because it’s like you get to choose from 15-20 homemade dishes all at once. Not to mention the desserts. While we ate we socialized, talked nursing and re-enforced the bonds that made us a community. But, how does a travel nurse who might have as many as 4 new assignments in a year keep that sense of community?

Enter the online community. Online communities have proliferated on the internet. For virtually every type of hobby or interest there is a community for that; including nursing and travel nursing. Online communities have a number of different styles. One of the most popular is the online bulletin board or forum. Nursing forums allow nurses to communicate on a personal and a professional level. With an online forum you can exchange recipes, talk about current events, discuss clinical practice and review work conditions in different areas. You can view comments made by your fellow nurses and respond to them. The nice thing about this is that you don’t have wait for your friends to be out of bed or off work to log in and visit.

Nursing forums can be very focused such as the forum for emergency nursing found on the nurserve.co.uk at http://www.nurserve.co.uk/newforum/forum_topics.asp?FID=1 or quite broad and appealing to the general nursing community such as the forums at allnurses.com or ultimatenurse.com.

There are also nursing blogs, e-zines and mailing lists where users post to the list and you can receive emails with everyone’s reply. These tend to get a bit of spam but nurses still do use them to communicate, encourage each other and provide the kind of support you would expect from a community.

Some travel nurse specific forums that I have found online include
http://www.nurse-forum.com/nursing-4-0.html
http://www.ultimatenurse.com/forum/f7/
http://allnurses.com/forums/f54/

Want to know how much a registered nurse makes in California?


Not sure about travel nursing? Check out my site The-Travel-Nurse.com and learn what Travel Nursing is about. You don't have to worry about being called 6 times by a travel agency recruiter because the site is not sponsored by an agency. It's written by a travel nurse for travel nurses.