The New Year Interview

So how do you get Gary to slow down long enough for an interview, especially when he has already agreed to do one for his other blog?  

Simple.  Offer him a StarBucks coffee.  If you want to make sure he stays seated for the whole interview, slip him a decaf and let him think it's regular.

Gary recently sat down for an interview posted on his other blog, www.garysglobalgab.com and so was willing to make the same effort on this blog as well, below are a few of the highlights of that conversation.

Thanks for giving me the time to ask you a few questions Gary, so let me get right to it.  I know you had a year of big changes, what do you think was the biggest surprise of the year?

Hey thanks for the opportunity to share thoughts in this kind of format, its fun being interviewed, if I had realized it sooner I would have granted more during the year.  Let me start with saying I hate questions asking the biggest, greatest, best of year; but since it’s your first I’ll let you get away with it. 

I would have to say my biggest surprise is how much I enjoy California.  I had often heard about how there is such a variety in this state, with mountains, valleys and the ocean all within sight of each other. It really is true, this is an exciting place to live.  The people are friendlier than I imagined them, and the diversity is very exciting to me.

What was your biggest surprise professional wise?

I think that would have to be the lack of any real surprise.  Sure there is more diversity in employees than in Missouri but the systems like how I assess patients; communications in regards to charting and with physicians is not really that different.  It was comforting to know that with a little flexibility on my part, adapting to a new system wasn’t that difficult.

Do you think your recruiter can take some credit for placing you in a position that you could adapt to easily?

My recruiter, Denise did a great job of listening to me, with the resources available to her we worked through possibilities that suited what I was looking for.  The funny thing though, is originally we were looking for work on the East coast and ended up in California; something I actually ended up grateful for.  So even though we wound up on the other side of the continent, the smaller requirements that I gave her; near the ocean, large city, warm weather, were still met.  

So to answer your question, can she take some credit for the placement; she is welcome to take credit since it has been a good experience.

I understand you will definitely be leaving your current assignment for a new one this spring, any idea where you are going?

I have learned there is no point in making too definite of a plan, but I will be obtaining Hawaii and Washington state licenses.  We are hoping for an assignment on Oahu for the spring and considering Washington in the summer before heading back to warm weather in the winter. If we don’t make it to Hawaii first, I am considering short term assignments in order to keep the door open for Hawaii opportunities.

What have you learned about Hawaiian assignments so far?

Some recruiters have been telling me a job may be posted for only a few hours before it is filled, so competition sounds tough.  I have also been reading on www.city-data.com that pay is not great and housing expensive, but that is what I was told about Santa Monica, yet we found it tolerable. It’s Hawaii for crying out loud, I am sure it will be great!

Mary lived there for ten years so I feel like we have an inside edge to surviving anything that comes our way.  She still has friends on the Islands so we hope to fit in nicely.

Did you have any preconceived notions before you took to traveling and how did they turn out?

I just had to face that my personality sometimes makes it difficult to keep a low profile.  I had to tame that anyway and learn to be courteous and professional without standing out so much.  I know some folks that know me are “thinking oh yeah right Gary”, but it’s true; I am less noticeable on the job these days. 

I think this will be an even greater lesson for me in Hawaii.  I mean hey, I’m already gonna be head and shoulder over most of the staff, so even more important that I do my work as professional as possible.  I want staff and management to appreciate that I am there to help and so fit in as part of the team.

Wow Gary.  I didn’t expect that for an answer. 

I didn’t expect it to be a lesson for me to learn.  I suppose it is just a small part of the bigger picture of learning to adapt.  Whether it be driving in L.A. traffic, or learning to speak a little Spanish; adapting to the work environment is just part of it.

Did you find living in L.A. County stressful?

Oh yeah.  I love Santa Monica as well as the Valley and beach living, but in the future I will be looking for housing closer to my work assignment, especially in urban areas.

Do you feel more seasoned gearing up for your next assignment?

You know, one thing I have taken with me when I start new assignments is; don’t forget what you already know.  So here are a few things I have already learned.

• Get the state license in advance.
  
• Control the flow of input from recruiters. 
  
• Be willing to find my own housing.
  

Do you plan on any new projects or interests for the New Year?

I started a new blog www.peeproast.com .  It is a fun site promoting a family tradition I started a few years back of an Easter PEEP roast.  I will be introducing the tradition here in California and hope the web site will get it going on a broader scale.  I think it has the possibility of replacing the egg hunt as the holiday favorite.

Writing is becoming more important to me and I hope to be taking it more seriously this coming year, and so you can expect some new projects in that regard.

Sounds great Gary!  I am sure I can speak for others that we will be looking forward to them.

Wait a minute; is this coffee decaf?  I gotta get me some more coffee.  Interview over, but thanks for taking the time to write down some thoughts from our conversation and I look forward to doing this again.  I also want to wish everyone a happy New Year.

 

How to Converse With Travel Nurse Recruiters

This week a winter advisory was posted for Ventura County. 

“Oh no!” I thought, “Could it get too cold and the geraniums might die from frost?” I wondered sarcasticly.

No, the post stated that it could get down to the 40’s at night and it might rain. I’m not sure why that is worthy of a winter advisory, but rain is a big deal here.  They receive so little of it.

I continued watching the weather and saw temperatures across the country, Midwest states that won’t reach above freezing for the day, and an ice storm in the New England area.  I have lived with cold weather and two ice storms in as many years of late.  I feel for those people. Yet, I can also say that I love travel nursing.

A more pertinent advisory came from my recruiter; “You have been approved for renewal” said the email.  Yep, that’s right another 13 weeks at the same assignment.  Mary and I enjoy the beach house and the small community of people in the area, just last weekend we were invited to a dance and had a great time, and staying put for the next few months makes sense to us.

Since the first of the month the calls from recruiters has increased as they knew my current contract was coming to an end.  Unfortunately I have had little time to speak to them by phone, not because I have been too busy, but cell phone coverage at the beach is so poor.  So this week I made a point to notify all of them saved in my Travel Nurse Email folder of my plans to renew for another 13 weeks and that I will be wanting an assignment in Hawaii in mid-April.  I even specified what island I want to move to.

Now some travel nurses prefer to stick with one agency, usually because they love working with their recruiter so much, and might think that I am not happy with my recruiter, Denise.  Not true!  I have given detailed info to her and will certainly give preference to her company should they come through with an assignment on Oahu.

Truth is, I enjoy good conversation and recruiters that can communicate intelligently and exchange information with me I consider valuable.

Many nurses I have spoken with refer to recruiters as pests, like constant salesmen with a pitch.  Yet I still consider this a good thing; remember they are calling you with jobs.  I am sure many unemployed folks pray for such a problem.  I recall hospitals I have worked for that tried to make us nurses feel we should be just grateful we still had a job, they usually pulled that trick when there was a cut in our benefits or an increase in our healthcare coverage.

The one thing that I enjoy about a conversation with a good recruiter is that they are great listeners.  Any recruiter will first determine how well organized your thinking is by running down a list of your priorities, something you should have already written down yourself.  If you have not done so, write them down as you talk to a recruiter; they are.

A recruiter needs basic information about you to help determine what kind of assignments to offer.  Some less experienced recruiters you can tell are just checking down a list, but great recruiters easily maneuver through this with casual conversation.

The initial conversations with a recruiter should be about you.  What do you want?  What is important to you?  What are your goals and how can the recruiter help you achieve them?

The recruiter will extend overtures of how he/she and their company can assist you, but do they go through too great an extent?  I would rather not hear extended oration about how honest they are, I will determine that as I continue working with them, I prefer hearing about basic benefits they offer. 

For I too have a list; 

            Day one health insurance coverage?

            A retirement plan such as 401k

            Does the company pay matching funds into that 

plan?

            Direct deposit pay?

            License compensation?

            Completion bonus?

Your list will certainly be different, but most importantly is that you have one.  A great resource to creating your own list can be found at Highway Hypodermics by Epstein Larue.

The recruiter of course wants you to take an assignment with them and their company, and I make a point of letting them know that I am in the travel business for many years.  Even if I don’t take their assignment this time around it is worth keeping a relationship with me as they may have an assignment I will want at a later time.

I always make sure recruiters have updated contact information with me as my email address changed in the past year, and conversations usually end with a plan for a general time for a return phone call.  They then enter that information into their data base.  I also have them help me with that, by asking that they send me an email recapping our conversation along with their contact info. 

When I receive the email, I review how well they recapped our conversation.  Did they pay attention to my priorities? I then save the note in a folder I have created for nursing recruiters for easy retrieval. 

As time draws closer to a new assignment, I will go into greater detail about my experience through the procedure and how the process actually works.

I also want to share information I learn about assignments to Hawaii.  We’ll see how much this info actually lines up with my own experience there.

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Obama's Health Care Reform Encourages Discussion

President-Elect Obama is encouraging health care reform discussions across the country this holiday season. He then would like the discussed ideas and suggestions forwarded to him in order to help sort out and reform the system.

When my family gathers, rarely do we avoid the rule of not discussing politics or religion. This makes for lively and spirited conversations that end in more than a few heated occasions around the dinner table. Only recently have we patched up wounds from opposing conservatives, liberals, and Clintonites in our family. Which only leaves me wondering, why on earth would Obama want to ruin my holiday dinners?

So no, I won’t be encouraging the family in this topic, but I do think the internet and blogs is a great place for this discourse and so I sat down this morning to pen my articulations on this great topic. I supposed that somewhere deep down inside of me were the musings of all that was wrong with our current system, and after calm reflection, I could divine the solutions.

Jotting down notes however only ended up ensnaring me in a thorny tangle of ideas and their counters. For here you must understand, I suffer a malady of always looking at both sides of a coin, and thus unable to make up my mind. One side of the coin may say “Yes.”, but I always know there is a back side saying “No.”; and so I tend to live in the “Maybe.”.

Therefore my ideas on health care reform are not intended to sway a person to one side or another, but mainly just a list of observations from being employed in health care delivery, namely Intensive Care and Travel Nursing. This list is by no means intended to be inclusive, but rather a starting point to initiate discussion, and thought.

1. The topic of Health Care Reform is too big. Using the topic “Health Care Reform” reminds me of the old story of blind men discussing an elephant. One man says the health care snout is too long, another says the tail is too small, while another states that the legs are too thick. A simple and old analogy, but how many people really see the whole elephantine picture of health care?

2. We need agreed upon definitions. What is health care? Try asking a few different people and see how many answers you receive. For many people, it is sickness prevention. For others it is a return to wellness. Yet for others it is the avoidance of death at all costs, regardless of quality of life.

3. We need consequences. The old adage; “people get what they deserve, and deserve what they get” seems dead these days. Government seems hell bent on bailing out everybody. Now not all sickness is deserved, but a lot of behaviors end up with consequential sickness. Is it right that the group must pay the burden for the individual’s right to exercise his liberty even though those actions end in predetermined consequences?

4. Health Care litigation must be reined in. Does the right to sue really keep health care delivery competent and honest? The management of liability risk has infested health care delivery with staggering amounts of unnecessary dollars spent. An answer to this must be found.

5. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. There must be a way found to fund prevention from sickness and disease. There is currently a big push for national infra-structure rebuilding as an investment for our country. The same should apply for our health care.

6. A paradigm shift regarding health care must occur. I think anything less than a complete shift in how we approach health care will result in merely a reshuffling of the deck of cards; a rearranging of the dominoes. Same game, different mess.

I hope my short list has inspired ideas. Health Care is an intensely personal matter and perhaps you have experience on either the receiving or delivery sides of the subject. Please send me a note on your thoughts and suggestions and I would be glad to post them, and possibly send them forward to greater thinkers than myself.

Skype Me

Our neighbor Dave is an interesting fellow.  He owns no automobile, the pick-up he drives belongs to his son who has been in Mexico for the past year.  Dave hasn't worked a job in years and because of this many in the neighborhood either think him wealthy or a beach bum.  

"It's neither" he insists to me, "more like somewhere in the middle."

This summer Dave spent a month fishing in Alaska and in the next month he intends to spend the rest of winter somewhere in Central or South America.  He doesn't know how long he will be gone; he just knows when it's time to come back. 

Dave has never owned a computer, until that is, the day he came into my kitchen for coffee and met Hannah, my daughter and Lidia, my 20 month old granddaughter on the computer using skype.  Skype is a free video phone application you can use on your computer.  You can get the free download here.

Lidia hopped down from Hannah's lap during the conversation to show off how she spins on an office chair then gets off to dizzily stumble about the room.  Granddad laughed at her, Dave was amazed that he was watching this on a laptop.

"It's like visiting with your family right here in your living room."  he says.

An hour later he is back at our house with a handful of advertisements while Mary and I join him for a ride to the local stores to help him pick out a laptop.  Even in the stores I noticed computers that stated they were Skype ready. 

This will be our first Holiday season away from family but already we were able to join post-turkey dinner celebrations via skype, and you can bet that we will be part of Christmas celebrations as well thanks to this wonderful technology.  With the portability of the laptop I have even been able to give house tours of our seaside home!

For travelers, others than a plane ticket, I can't think of a better way of joining your loved ones for the holidays.

After you download Skype you can find me by using my user name "gcox1958" or my email address.  Be sure to give me a ring!