Stories from the Road: The Allied Travel Blog
Welcome to Stories From the Road, the Club Staffing’s Allied Travel Blog! Wherever your allied healthcare travel experiences take you – from Alaska to Florida – we want to know about them! Submit your story to us today and we just might share your story with rest of the world!
"Massachusetts, Wisconsin, Mississippi, North Carolina, Alaska, and of course California…"
Those are just a few of the states that Loretta Gaines, radiation therapist (RTT) with Club Staffing, formerly known as Resources On Call, rattles off as she recounts the places she has lived since starting her career as a traveling healthcare professional over three and a half years ago.
But getting to visit and live in an exciting new city and state every few months is just one of the reasons Loretta took her career on the road. New opportunities, skills and friends are also why she chose the freedom and flexibility of a career as a mobile healthcare professional.
Although Gaines has worked in the healthcare industry since 1990, it was actually her father's illness that that led her to her current career as a radiation therapist, which she has been practicing now for seven years.
"I worked as a pre-planner in a cancer center and then my dad was diagnosed with prostate cancer and ended up coming to the center where I worked for his treatment. The CEO of the company allowed me to go through the process with my father, and suggested that I should look into going back to school to become a radiation therapist."
Inspired by the work of the healthcare professionals who assisted her father throughout the treatment, Gaines took her boss's advice and enrolled in school to pursue her new career path.
"Three years later, I was a radiation therapist," she said.
From the very beginning of her journey to become an RTT, Loretta knew she wanted to travel while doing so. "I always wanted to travel. In school they would have speakers come and talk to the students about traveling and how you can go state to state working at different places, and I knew that's what I wanted to do."
Loretta has used her travel career to not only expand her horizons personally, but to also develop professionally. She uses each assignment as a way to learn as much as she can about her profession—and her patients.
"As a traveler, you get so much more experience to new equipment and technology," she explained." You always get to learn new skills when you go to a new place."
"It's nice to go into a facility where I don't know everything. You can learn new things and also teach your co-workers things they may not know."
By Melissa Wirkus, associate editor
