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She remembers her employers telling her and her coworkers to ‘suck’ as they struggled to treat six patients each and patched their protective gear with duct tape until they were finished. ‘collapses completely. The roughly $ 800 a week she took home was no longer worth it.
“I wasn’t asleep and had the most anxiety in my life,” Tripeny said. “I’m like, ‘I’m going to go where my skills are needed and I can rest assured that I have the protection I need.’”
In April, she packed her bags for a two-month contract in then-COVID hotspot New Jersey, in what she called a “mass exodus” of nurses leaving the hospital in the suburbs of Denver to become itinerant nurses. His new salary? About $ 5,200 per week and with a contract requiring adequate protective equipment.
Months later, the offers – and the stakes – are even higher for nurses ready to relocate. In Sioux Falls, SD, nurses can earn over $ 6,200 per week. A recent posting for a job at Fargo offered more than $ 8,000 per week. Some can get up to $ 10,000.
At the start of the pandemic, hospitals were arguing over ventilators, COVID tests and personal protective equipment. Now sites across the country are competing for nurses. The surge in the drop in COVID cases has turned hospital staffing into a sort of national bidding war, with hospitals willing to pay exorbitant salaries to get the nurses they need. It threatens to shift the supply of nurses to richer areas, leaving rural and urban public hospitals understaffed as the pandemic worsens and some hospitals unable to care for critically ill patients.
“It’s a huge threat,” said Angelina Salazar, CEO of the Western Healthcare Alliance, a consortium of 29 small hospitals in rural Colorado and Utah. “Rural hospitals cannot afford to pay that kind of salary.”
Surge capacity
Hospitals have long relied on mobile nurses to fill staffing gaps without committing to long-term hiring. At the start of the pandemic, doctors and nurses traveled from unaffected areas to hot spots like California, Washington state and New York to help deal with regional surges. But now, with virtually every part of the country experiencing a surge – infecting healthcare professionals in the process – the competition for the limited number of available nurses is becoming more intense.
“We all thought, ‘Well, when it’s Colorado’s turn, we’ll use the same resources; we’ll call our neighboring states and they’ll send help, ”said Julie Lonborg, spokesperson for the Colorado Hospital Association. “Now it’s a national epidemic. It’s not just one or two spots like it was in the spring. It’s really important across the country, which means everyone is looking for these resources.
In North Dakota, Tessa Johnson said she receives multiple posts per day on LinkedIn from headhunters. Johnson, president of the North Dakota Nurses Association, said the pandemic appears to be accelerating the brain drain of nurses. She suspects more nurses could choose to leave or retire soon after North Dakota said healthcare workers with asymptomatic cases of COVID-19 could stay on the job.
Utah’s four major healthcare systems have seen nurses move on to itinerant nursing positions, said Jordan Sorenson, project manager for the Utah Hospital Association.
“Nurses are quitting, joining mobile nursing companies, and going to work at another hospital down the street, which is two to three times the rate,” he says. “So it’s really kind of a Rob-Peter-to-Pay-Paul staffing situation.
Hospitals not only pay the higher salaries offered to traveling nurses, but also pay a commission to the traveling nurses agency, Sorenson said. Utah hospitals are trying to avoid hiring nurses from other hospitals in the state. However, hiring in a neighboring state like Colorado could mean Colorado hospitals poaching Utah.
“In the wake of the current surge in COVID-related hospitalizations, calling the RN labor market ‘fierce’ is an understatement,” said Adam Seth Litwin, associate professor of industrial and labor relations at Cornell University . “While the healthcare industry can somehow find more beds, it can’t just go out and buy more frontline caregivers.
Litwin said he was happy to see the job market rewarding essential workers – disproportionately women and people of color – with higher wages. Under normal circumstances, it is ideal to allow markets to determine where people will work and for what pay.
“On the other hand, we don’t operate under normal circumstances,” he said. “In the midst of a serious public health crisis, I fear that the individual incentives faced by hospitals on the one hand and RNs on the other hand come into sharp conflict with the needs of society as a whole. . “
Some hospitals are exploring ways to overcome staffing issues without blowing the budget. This could include changing nurse-to-patient ratios, although this would likely affect patient care. In Utah, the hospital association has discussed with the state board of nursing the possibility of allowing nursing students in their final year of training to be certified early.
Growth industry
Meanwhile, business is booming for companies focused on healthcare staffing such as Wanderly and Krucial Staffing.
“When COVID started and New York was an epicenter, at Wanderly we kind of looked at it and we said, ‘OK, this is our time to shine,’ said David Deane, vice president. senior from Wanderly, a website that allows healthcare professionals to compare offers from different agencies. “It’s time to help nurses get to these destinations as quickly as possible. And help recruiters find those nurses. “
Deane said the company has doubled its staff since the start of the pandemic. Demand is booming – Rocky Mountain states appearing in up to 20 times more job postings on the site than in January. And more and more people are responding to this demand.
In 2018, according to data from a national survey, around 31,000 mobile nurses were working across the country. Today, Deane estimates, there are at least 50,000 nurses traveling. Deane, who calls travel nurses “superheroes,” suspects many of them are post-operative nurses who were fired when their hospitals stopped doing elective surgeries during the initial lockdowns.
Competition for nurses, especially those with intensive care experience, is stiff. After all, a South Dakota hospital isn’t just competing with facilities in other states.
“We sent nurses to Aruba, Bahamas, and Curaçao because they needed help with COVID,” Deane said. “You go there, you make $ 5,000 a week and all your expenses are paid for, right?” Who will not say yes?
Krucial Staffing specializes in sending healthcare workers to disaster sites, using military style logistics. He was filling hotels and hiring dozens of buses to take nurses to hot spots in New York and Texas. CEO Brian Cleary said that since the start of the pandemic, the company has increased its administrative staff from 12 to more than 200.
“Right now we’re at the highest volume we’ve reached,” said Cleary, who added that in Halloween weekend alone, around 1,000 nurses joined the roster. “Reservists”.
With a base rate of $ 95 an hour, he said, some nurses who work overtime end up coming away with $ 10,000 a week, though there are downsides, such as the position being does not have health insurance and that it is an unstable boom. walk-and-bust.
Hidden costs
Amber Hazard, who lives in Texas, started out as a traveling intensive care nurse before the pandemic and said eye-catching sums like these come with hidden fees, paid for with good reason.
“The way your soul is affected by this is nothing you can put a price on,” she said.
In a high-paying job caring for COVID patients during the first wave in New York City, she recalls walking into the break room of a Bronx hospital and seeing a sign on the wall showing how usual nurses were on strike.
“He said, you know, ‘We don’t do that. It’s not sure, ”Hazard said. “And it wasn’t sure. But someone had to do it.
The highlight of his time there was placing a wedding ring on the finger of a cured patient. But Hazard said she secured far more body bags than rings on patients.
Tripeny, the traveling nurse who moved from Colorado, now works in Kentucky with cardiac surgery patients. When that contract ends, she says, she could revert back to COVID care.
Previously in New Jersey, she had been marked by times when she couldn’t give people the care they needed, not to mention times when she removed a deceased patient from a ventilator, watching the damage that the viruses can do by removing the tubes. filled with blackened blood from the lungs.
She now has to pay out of pocket for mental health therapy, unlike when she was on the staff of a hospital. But as a self-styled traveler, she knows every gig will be over in a few weeks.
At the end of each week in New Jersey, she said, “I was just looking at my paycheck and I was like ‘OK. It is acceptable. I can do it.'”
This story has been updated to clarify North Dakota’s position on allowing infected workers to stay on the job.
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