How One CRNA Turned Locums Into a Life of Freedom at Sea

CRNA Bart spent years building the stable medical career he was told to want. Eventually, he realized stability was getting in the way of freedom. CRNA locum tenens jobs gave him the flexibility to build a life that looked completely different from the one he originally imagined.

The view from Bart’s kitchen window changes every few months.

A 44-foot catamaran is home now. Three bedrooms, three bathrooms, and an ever-shifting panorama of coastline that most people only see on vacation. When one locum tenens assignment with Barton wraps up, Bart and his wife raise anchor and head toward the next destination, and a new hospital badge is clipped beside a marina key card.

“People say, ‘You can what?'” he says, laughing. “And I say yes, you heard that right. I live on a sailboat and go up and down the coast as a locum tenens CRNA.”

It sounds unbelievable at first. For Bart, though, it became surprisingly practical.

How One CRNA Found More Flexibility Through Locum Tenens

Bart became a registered nurse in 2001 before returning to school later in life to earn his CRNA credential in 2015. He entered anesthesia the way many clinicians do: looking for meaningful work, strong colleagues, and long-term career stability.

For a while, he found it. But over time, he started wanting something different outside the hospital, too. He craved more autonomy, flexibility and the ability to choose where he lived and how he spent his time. A hospital acquisition and shifting workplace dynamics reinforced those feelings, but the desire for change had already been building.

“I just started realizing I didn’t want to be tied down to one place forever,” Bart says. “I wanted more freedom to choose where I lived, where I worked, and how I spent my time.”

The traditional model of permanent employment started feeling heavier than secure. It was defined by strict schedules, limited flexibility, increasing bureaucracy and expectations that life would revolve around the system rather than the other way around.

Bart left the version of medicine that no longer resembled what he’d signed up for.

Why Some CRNAs Are Choosing Mobility Over Traditional Stability

More than five years into locum tenens practice, Bart structures his life around three-to-six month coastal contracts — though some run longer.

He no longer owns a car. That detail tends to stop people. No car? But the logic is clean: assignments provide transportation when needed, and without a permanent address, permanent possessions start to feel like anchors rather than assets. The boat moves, the work moves, and  everything else is optional.

“I just live on a boat,” he says, as if it’s the most normal thing in the world.

What Bart found most interesting about locum tenens work was a compression of risk. The thing most clinicians fear about leaving permanent employment is instability. Bart reframes the calculus entirely.

“If you don’t like it, three months and you can go somewhere else,” he says. “You have that freedom.”

Permanence, in his view, isn’t stability. It’s inflexibility dressed up as security. He’s not alone in rethinking it. The locum tenens market has grown substantially over the last decade, with staffing demand accelerated by physician shortages, burnout, and scheduling flexibility needs. Some industry estimates suggest over 50,000 physicians work locum tenens assignments annually in the U.S.

How Locum Tenens Can Make CRNAs Better Clinicians

There’s a dimension to locum tenens that doesn’t always  make it into the recruitment brochures: it makes you a better clinician, Bart says. 

Working across hospitals, health systems, and states — particularly as a CRNA, where scope of practice varies meaningfully by state — means constantly adapting to different workflows, different team cultures, and different approaches to the same procedures.

“You get stuck in certain places and they do anesthesia certain ways,” Bart says. “Then you go somewhere else and it’s completely different. You learn so many different ways of doing anesthesia.”

Bart says the loum tenens clinician who has seen a dozen different systems solve the same problem has a wider toolkit than one who has perfected a single institution’s approach.

What CRNAs Should Know Before Starting Locum Tenens

Bart isn’t naive about why some colleagues hesitate to jump into the locum tenens water. 

Health insurance outside employer coverage can be complicated, but there are resources and recruiters to guide you through the journey. For Bart, he  waited until his children finished high school before fully committing to mobile life.

For younger CRNAs and students who ask him whether they should pursue locums early, his advice is this:

“Give yourself a year at a facility,” he says. “Once you’ve got a year underneath your belt, turn locum and do whatever you want to do.”

When it comes to CRNAs, finding quality locum tenens assignments is never a problem, he says. CRNAs remain among the highest-demand locum specialties due to surgical staffing shortages and rural access gaps.

The Growing Demand for Flexibility in Healthcare Careers

Clinician burnout is structural rather than individual. Loss of autonomy consistently ranks among the top contributors — and according to Medscape’s Physician Burnout & Depression Report, roughly 45–50% of physicians report burnout symptoms annually. Corporate consolidation, eroding professional identity, shrinking control over one’s own schedule: the conditions that drove Bart off the traditional path are the same ones pushing practitioners out of medicine entirely. 

His choice isn’t available to every clinician in every life stage, and he’d be the first to say so. But it illustrates something the locum tenens industry often undersells: that the flexibility isn’t just logistical. For the right clinician at the right moment, it’s existential.

He’s found new colleagues, explored coastal towns most people only see from a rental car window, and built a version of professional life that tracks with what he actually values.

“It’s a lifestyle,” he says. “You meet new cool people. You learn new things. You see different ways to do things.”

Outside the OR, the boat sits at its slip. The water moves. The view, as always, is subject to change.