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DENVER – In March, Claire Tripeny watched her dream job fall apart. She worked as a critical care nurse at St. Anthony’s Hospital in Lakewood, Colo., And loved it, despite the typical poor salary in the area. But when Covid-19 hit, that calculation changed.
She remembers her employers telling her and her co-workers to “suck” as they struggled to treat six patients each and patched their protective gear with duct tape until it was finished. ‘collapses completely. The roughly $ 800 a week she took home was no longer worth it.
“I wasn’t sleeping and I 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.'”
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In April, she packed her bags for a two-month contract in New Jersey, then a Covid-19 hot spot, in what she called a “mass exodus” of nurses leaving 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, South Dakota, nurses can earn more than $ 6,200 per week. A recent post for a job in Fargo, North Dakota 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-19 tests and personal protective equipment. Now sites across the country are competing for nurses. The surge in the fall in Covid-19 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. “There is no way for rural hospitals 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 outbreaks – infecting healthcare professionals in the process – the competition for the limited number of available nurses is becoming increasingly intense.
“We all thought, ‘Well, when it’s Colorado’s turn, we’ll be using the same resources. We will call our neighboring states and they will send help, ”said Julie Lonborg, spokesperson for the Colorado Hospital Association. . “Now it’s a national epidemic. It’s not just one or two places 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 Governor Doug Burgum told healthcare workers to stay on the job even if they tested positive for Covid-19.
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 from Utah.
“In the wake of the current surge in hospitalizations at Covid, to call the RN workforce ‘fierce’ is an understatement,” said Adam Seth Litwin, associate professor of industrial and labor relations at Cornell University. “While the health sector can somehow find more beds, it can’t just go out and buy more frontline caregivers.
Litwin said he was happy to see the labor 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 facing 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.
Demand in the Rocky States
Meanwhile, business is booming for companies focused on healthcare staffing, such as Wanderly and Krucial Staffing.
“When Covid started up and New York was an epicenter, at Wanderly we kind of looked at it and said, ‘OK, this is our time to shine,’ said David Deane, senior vice president from Wanderly, a website that allows health care professionals to compare offers from different agencies. “‘It’s our time to help nurses get to these destinations as quickly as possible. And to help recruiters find these nurses.'”
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Deane said the company has doubled its staff since the start of the pandemic. Demand is booming – with the Rocky Mountain states posting up to 20 times more vacancies than in January. And more people are responding to this demand.
In 2018, according to data from a national survey, around 31,000 itinerant nurses were working across the country. Today, Deane estimates, there are at least 50,000 itinerant nurses. Deane, who calls the traveling nurses “superheroes,” suspects many of them are post-operative nurses who were fired when their hospitals ceased performing elective surgery during the first 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 Curacao 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 is not going to say yes?
Krucial Staffing specializes in sending healthcare workers to disaster sites, using military style logistics. He packed hotels and hired 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 our highest volume that we’ve been,” said Cleary, who said that on Halloween weekend alone, about 1,000 nurses joined the “reservists” list. “.
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 doesn’t come with health insurance and that’s 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.
She remembers walking into the break room of a Bronx hospital in a high paying job treating Covid-19 patients during the first wave in New York City and seeing a sign on the wall saying how the 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 her time there was putting 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 return to Covid-19 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’s OK. I can do it. “”
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