Traveling Physical Therapy Explained

My wife accepted a job as a traveling physical therapist, and since it core to our writings here, I thought I would take a moment to explain it.

Traveling physical therapists are essentially temporary employees for healthcare. A healthcare facility will employ travelers for a variety of reasons, including:

• To fill an opening while they look for a permanent employee
• To fill an opening created by an employee on a temporary leave such as disability or pregnancy
• To "try-out" an employee for a potential permanent position
• To help healthcare facilities deal with unexpected spikes in patient case load

Generally, traveling physical therapy assignments are 13 weeks in length. As a result, many physical therapists do not view this as a viable option, either because of local concerns that keep them in one location, or a desire to not uproot their lives every 3 months.

For those who have a desire to travel while working, it can be an excellent opportunity. Generally most assignments pay similar to permanent positions, as well as many other benefits:

• Housing is provided at a nearby location to the facility
• Travel costs to and from the assignment are covered
• A per-diem for food and other incidentals is generally paid to the employee

These benefits are in addition to standard medical, dental, and retirement benefits offered by permanent placements as well.

As an assignment is nearing completion, the physical therapist can have their traveling company start working on getting their next assignment. There appears to be more traveling physical therapist positions at any given time than there are physical therapists willing to travel for work, so work is fairly consistent.

We have both concluded that we do not want to do this permanently. However, as we are young now, it is a good option for us in the short-term. Although honestly, a majority of the people we have spoken with about traveling loved it so much that they were hard pressed to not continue. So we will see what happens.

What Started This Journey

Back in May of this year, my finace (at the time) came home from work more upset than she had ever been. She had been unhappy with her job for some time, and was hoping to make a change after our wedding. This day, however, was the breaking point. Over the evening, we finished some updates to her resume, and sent it to a single traveling physical therapy website.

Now, we had discussed traveling before. Traveling physical therapists are used to help hospitals and medical facilities when they need a short-term fill-in for a permanent position. The most common reasons for a traveler include a temporary fill-in after a full-time employee leaves, or maternity/paternity leave. We have enjoyed traveling for leisure since we started dating, and figured that this could be a great alternative for her to work and get paid to travel.

We both went to work the next morning, thinking very little of what we had done the night before. When I picked her up from work that evening, she was extremely excited. During the day, she had received phone calls from five different recruiters for travel health care companies. We went home, and had 5 more emails as well.

Over the next month, we did our due diligence regarding each of these groups. Each of them had different benefits, offered different locations of assignments, and offered differing levels of compensation. During this time, we spoke with her co-workers and peers who were familiar with traveling, trying to find out what the downside was. The consensus that we came to was that the downside was the traveling required of it.

You may ask, then, how does this relate to this blog? We have tried not to eliminate too many locations from the places we are willing to go, because we believe that you can do anything for 13 weeks. We thought it would be sting to document our travels, and the things we notice as a result.

The other side of this lies in the fact that as a result of going with her to these assignments, I am going to be rapidly unemployed. My current employer will allow me to continue to work remotely, while they search for a capable replacement for me. So, at some point in the coming months, I will definitely be unemployed.

While my job training would allow me to take traveling assignments as well, coordinating these would be extremely difficult. So you will also see posts from time to time about how I am earning money, and how we are transitioning to a single income.

I am really hoping that these experiences will be enlightening to us, and that you'll find our writings to be interesting.