TotalMed has again been named among the Best Places to Work in Staffing, an award based primarily on what employees themselves report about their workplace.
That detail is the part we care about. The recognition reflects survey responses from our own people on leadership, growth, and whether the work feels worth doing.
Our internal teams support clinicians through moves, licensure, credentialing, and first days at unfamiliar facilities. Doing that well depends on people who stay long enough to get good at it.
Thank you to the team, and to the clinicians and partners who trust us with work that matters.
What changes after your first contract
Expect the first two weeks to feel slower than your competence. You will know the clinical work and not know where anything is kept, which is a disorienting combination for experienced clinicians. It passes. Keeping a short running note of small local facts — badge access quirks, who to page overnight, where the difficult supplies live — shortens the adjustment considerably and is worth the two minutes a day.
Extensions are usually the best offer you will get, and they are easiest to secure early. If the assignment is working, raise the possibility around week seven or eight rather than waiting for the facility to ask in week twelve. You keep your housing, you skip a fresh onboarding, and you negotiate from the strong position of being the known quantity. Say so plainly if you want it; nobody benefits from a guessing game.
Keep your own records in parallel with whatever the agency holds. Save every signed contract, timesheet, and confirmation of hours somewhere you control. Discrepancies are uncommon and almost always clerical, but resolving one is a five-minute conversation when you have the document and a genuinely painful week when you do not. The same folder makes the next assignment easier to set up.
Talking it through with your recruiter
Understand how your pay package is assembled before you compare two of them. A weekly figure combines taxable hourly wages with non-taxable stipends for housing and meals, and two packages advertising the same headline number can differ meaningfully in what reaches your account and in what a lender will later treat as income. Ask for the breakdown in writing, and compare like with like.
Plan for the unpaid gaps between contracts. Even a smooth transition tends to leave a week without shifts, and a licensure delay or a facility start-date change can stretch that further. A cash buffer of a few weeks is the difference between choosing your next assignment and taking the first one offered. This is the most common piece of advice from clinicians several years into travelling, and the one most often skipped at the start.