Radiation Therapists play a critical role at your facility. By using ionizing radiation to treat diseases like cancer, they are an important part of your critical healthcare team, which is why it’s a challenge when they go on vacation or take a planned leave. With many patients waiting weeks or even months for radiation therapy, delaying treatments until the therapist returns hardly seem like an option.
Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be. In this article, we’ll review the ways that a traveling Radiation Therapist can support your facility and how a radiation therapy staffing agency can help.
What is a Traveling Radiation Therapist?
Traveling Radiation Therapists work on a locum tenens basis, meaning that they temporarily fill in for employees who are out of the office. They perform the same tasks as regular Radiation Therapists, such as operating IMRT linear accelerators and other machines that use radiation to combat cancer. Although employed on a contract basis, traveling Radiation Therapists play a vital role in helping cancer patients fight their devastating disease.
Benefits of Using a Traveling Radiation Therapist
Below is an overview of the many benefits that a locum (traveling) Radiation Therapist can bring to your hospital or clinic.
1. Avoid Disrupting Treatment Delivery Schedules
Smaller health facilities in particular often struggle to meet the needs of their local populations. If one of your Radiation Therapists takes parental leave for months, it can delay life-saving treatments and create a backlog that leaves staff and patients scrambling and stressed. Many locations are still dealing with higher patient loads due to the pandemic, so it doesn’t take much to impact schedules.
A traveling Radiation Therapist can help you better serve your patients by ensuring that treatments proceed as scheduled. As Radiation centres are mostly in larger areas, patients living in rural communities need to schedule their travel to the facility for treatment. This can be very expensive, time consuming and stressful on top of the health issues the patient is already facing.
A locum Radiation Therapist can minimize the need to reschedule patients and keep radiation therapy services going until you have a better idea whether you should hire someone full-time.
2. Save Money
Traveling Radiation Therapists are excellent options for hospitals and clinics in need of temporary coverage. They can cover shifts without you having to commit to hiring a full-time employee, which is often prohibitively expensive and takes time to implement.
When your facility needs reliable yet temporary staffing solutions, locum professionals can step in until your regular employees return. Since they have at least a few years of experience, they can join the team as soon as they arrive and keep treatment schedules on time.
3. Prevent Staff Burnout
Medical professionals like Radiation Therapists work extremely hard and often under stressful circumstances. When one of them goes on vacation, becomes ill, or takes parental leave, it can increase the burden carried by other team members. In 24-7 operations like hospitals, remaining staff can risk burnout.
A traveling Radiation Therapist makes it easier for your staff to maintain a better work-life balance. When their shift ends they want to (and should be able to) go home and decompress, not fill in for a colleague who’s going to be away for weeks or even months. Working long hours without respite can also lead to dangerous mistakes: fatigue can result in serious injuries to patients and staff. Keep your staff and patients safer by ensuring skilled temporary coverage when needed.
4. Meet Patient Demand
A traveling Radiation Therapist fills gaps in rotations that would otherwise leave healthcare facilities short-staffed and unable to meet patient needs. In addition, when surges in demand for services like radiation therapy occur, you can hire a locum to help deliver treatments without forcing patients to wait for their critical procedures.. Since travel Radiation Therapists tend to have years of experience behind them, they can go straight to work without needing extensive training or orientation first.
5. Increase Revenue
When patients need services that your facility doesn’t offer, they have to go elsewhere to get the specialized care they need. For example, you may have Radiation Therapists who are experienced in treating adults but have less practical experience with children, so parents with sick children may need to travel dozens or even hundreds of miles to receive the care they need.
When this happens, not only do you lose out on potential revenue, but these patients may have to leave the community for a long period of time because they can’t access treatment closer to friends and family. When you hire a traveling Radiation Therapist to provide cancer treatment services when needed, your facility benefits from the revenue and the patient doesn’t have to travel far from home.
How Do You Find a Traveling Radiation Therapist?
Radiation therapists with the relevant experience can be hard to find when short-term staffing needs arise. With experienced healthcare professionals in such high demand, how can you find the right one to cover extended hours, surges in demand, or staff absences?
With a radiation therapy staffing agency, you have access to pre-screened candidates who can hit the ground running when they arrive. At ProMed HR Solutions, we have a detailed screening process that includes detailed interviews, a criminal background check, and confirmation of availability. With our extensive database of certified healthcare specialists, each with at least two years’ experience, you can be confident that we can match you with a Radiation Therapist who will support your team with competency and professionalism.
Need a Traveling Radiation Therapist? Our Radiation Therapy Staffing Agency Can Help!
When you’re in urgent need of a skilled and experienced Radiation Therapist, ProMed HR Solutions can help. We serve the temporary healthcare staffing needs of medical facilities across Canada through our nationwide database of pre-vetted professionals that include Radiation Therapists.
By matching the skills, experience, and desires of our candidates with clients whose needs are parallel, we create a seamless experience for both parties, resulting in better patient outcomes. Radiation oncology departments and radiation cancer treatment centres in particular require unique and specialized services that we’re happy to provide. To learn more about how we can support your facility, visit www.promedhr.ca or call (833) 776-6336.
