Travel health nursing: expanding horizons for occupational health nurses.

Pre-travel care, with its focus on disease prevention and health promotion, is the cornerstone of travel health nursing practice. Pre-travel nursing services include risk assessment, immunizations, health counseling, and referrals. Individual travel health and safety risks vary and depend upon a number of different factors. These include: traveler health status, destination, trip duration, season of travel, type of accommodation, trip activities, and prevention efforts. More than 35% of U.S. international travel is business travel. Occupational health nurses have an important role to play to keep traveling employees, including frequent flyers, long stay expatriates, and special needs travelers, healthy, safe, and productive in the "global marketplace."