As covid persists, nurses are leaving staff jobs -- and tripling their salaries as travelers

[mahatmakanejeeves]

Health

As covid persists, nurses are leaving staff jobs — and tripling their salaries as travelers



Travel nurse Alex Stow, 25, after a shift at a hospital in Traverse City, Mich., on Dec. 2. (Elaine Cromie for The Washington Post)

By Lenny Bernstein
Today at 2:51 p.m. EST

CORRECTION
The American Hospital Association represents a wide variety of hospitals, including nonprofit, for-profit, government and others. A previous version of this article said the group represents only nonprofit hospitals. The article has been corrected.

Wanderlust, and the money to fund it, made Alex Stow’s decision easy. After working a couple of years in an intensive care unit, he signed up to be a travel nurse, tripling his pay to about $95 an hour by agreeing to help short-staffed hospitals around the country for 13 weeks at a time.

“Travel” proved a bit of a misnomer. His current assignment is in Traverse City, Mich., only a few hours from his old full-time job in Lansing — close enough that he still works per-diem shifts at his previous hospital.

Now Stow, 25, is buying a truck and a camper and preparing to hit the road. He’ll work where he wants and take time off to see the country between nursing assignments.

“As soon as I found out that was a thing, I thought, ‘That’s got my name written all over it,’ ” said Stow, who agreed to discuss his new work life if the hospitals were not named.

If 2020 was the year travel nursing took off, with 35 percent growth over the pre-pandemic year of 2019, this year has propelled it to new heights, with an additional 40 percent growth expected, according to an independent analyst of the health-care workforce.

{snip}

By Lenny Bernstein
Lenny Bernstein covers health and medicine. He started as an editor on The Washington Post’s National desk in 2000 and has worked in Metro and Sports. Twitter https://twitter.com/LennyMBernstein

[MontanaMama]

1. I've got two neighbors who are critical care nurses.

They both tell me that moral at each of their hospitals is quite low because of the travel nurse thing. They report working with nurses who are here for a few weeks making $2500 a week while their here. Regular hospital RNs don’t make nearly that wage. They both say if they didn’t have little kids at home, they might take advantage of the same opportunity. It’s not that they don’t understand the situation hospitals are in…they do…but it’s difficult to do the same thing someone else is doing and get a fraction of the same pay. I get it.

[dutch777]

2. Amazing anyone stays in front line nursing facing Covid.

I retired from hospital administration a few years ago but I can only imagine the tension in the front line in patient units and with nursing leadership. The hospitals have no real choice, their state licenses require them to have a certain number of operational beds and proscribe the number of caregivers to staff those beds. And while they might rather raise salaries across the board so there is less inequity between traveling nurses and regular staff nurses, they would never be compensated for that. Insurance companies and Medicare/Medicaid have fixed fee agreements for all major treatments and there is no current provision I am aware of that will assure the hospital any cost increase they incur to adequately staff beds will be reimbursed. Too bad, so sad is the attitude of payors. While huge sums of money pass through hospital coffers, it is just that, a pass through. I worked for a 300+ bed, top 100 nationally rated hospital outside of Seattle in a very well to do area. A typical year (pre-Covid) saw over $1 billion enter the hospital treasury. At the end of the year when debt and other encumbrances were accounted for, there was usually less than $1 million left. Federal Covid subsidies are probably paying for the traveling nurse premiums. And yes, probably could pay for some regular staff pay increases as well. But given all the money lost by having to delay many non-emergent treatments and surgery it probably wouldn't go far. I doubt that the non-profit community hospitals like the one I worked for have been even made whole to date. And then, what happens when the federal funding is gone? Let's just hope the nurses don't all quit and half the hospitals don't close due to insolvency. We are in a very precarious place with our health care system.

[mahatmakanejeeves]

3. Travel nurses, staffing industry pushed to the limits by COVID-19

I'm clearing out old emails.

Travel nurses, staffing industry pushed to the limits by COVID-19

By Mollie Jamison, Rylee Kirk, Izzy Koyama, Maya Leachman and Isaac Stone Simonelli Apr 28, 2021

Special for Cronkite News

PHOENIX – On one of her first days working in an Arizona hospital, Kelsi Shawd placed the bodies of COVID-19 patients into cadaver bags.

For months, Katherine Hall watched her patients suffer, not sure whether they would die or recover enough to go home.

Some nights, Johnathan Hopper drank 12 beers just to get to sleep after his shift ended at a New York hospital when the city was the epicenter of the pandemic in 2020.

“I’ve seen hundreds of people die,” Hopper said. “You can’t sleep, but you have to report to work the next day.”

Shawd, Hall and Hopper are among tens of thousands of travel nurses who have filled a growing health care staffing shortage exposed by a once in a generation pandemic.

Lured by lucrative contracts from a largely unregulated industry of staffing agencies, this nomadic workforce cycles between hot spots, adjusting to new work settings, different co-workers, unfamiliar assignments and long hours.

Travel nurses work as private contractors, taking assignments from staffing agencies that place them in hospitals across the country that are pressed for workers.

But after more than a year of witnessing unrelenting death and risking their own exposure on the front lines, some travel nurses are burning out. According to experts, the pandemic will have lasting repercussions on the temporary medical staffing sector and health care industry as a whole.

{snip}

For more stories from Cronkite News, visit cronkitenews.azpbs.org.

[Aristus]

4. My only objection to travel providers is that, at least at my organization,

they’re not contractually obligated to pull after-hours call.

Which means we have full coverage for clinic hours, but a reduced call roster, which means call more often, and increased potential for disturbed leisure time.