December 17, 2021 | 5:40 pm

  • Sarah Boden / WESA

    Sarah Boden covers health, science and technology for 90.5 WESA. Before coming to Pittsburgh in November 2017, she was a reporter for Iowa Public Radio, where she covered a range of topics, including the 2016 Iowa Caucuses.

    Sarah’s coverage has appeared in NPR’s Morning Edition, All Things Considered, Weekend Edition Saturday, and WBUR’s Here and Now. She has won multiple awards, including a regional Edward R. Murrow for her story of a legal challenge to Iowa criminal offenses.

(Pittsburgh) – UPMC will start an in-house recruitment program for travel nurses early next year.

These employees will be a new category of UPMC employees receiving higher pay to be part of a corps deployed across the 40 hospital system on six-week assignments.

Registered UPMC Travel Nurses and Surgical Technicians earn $ 85 and $ 63 an hour, respectively. These rates are two to three times the salaries shown in current UPMC job postings. At some point, travel assignments may also be open to other levels of nursing as well as respiratory therapists.

This initiative comes in the midst of a persistent nationwide lack of care. The high demand has resulted in many registered nurses leaving their hospitals to do travel assignments where they can earn as much as $ 12,000 a week.

“We’re losing nurses to agencies, people who want to travel and who are looking for a higher salary. So this is a way to reconnect with them and bring them back, ”said John Galley, chief human resources officer for the medical system.

UPMC says it hired multiple agencies in 2021 as sales more than doubled compared to 2020 when it claims it doesn’t need travel nurses. In 2022, the medical system aims to hire up to 800 travel nurses and surgical technicians.

While refusing to say exactly how much UPMC paid to hospital staff with travel nurses that year, Holly Lorenz announced that it was “more than we want to spend”.

Since a large portion of what the hospital system currently pays for a travel nurse goes to the agencies that organize the referrals, Lorenz said that UPMC will ultimately save money by doing these referrals themselves.

One way the medical system could attract nurses from established agencies is for UPMC travelers to receive the same benefit package as nurses. Stability can prove very attractive even in cases where UPMC’s hourly rate is lower than what someone can achieve through an agency position.

In addition to health insurance, these benefits also include pension and annuity insurance. While many travel agents offer insurance, this coverage is often not extended to nurses between assignments. But unlike agency nurses, UPMC travelers have less flexibility in deciding when and where to take assignments.

Another benefit of travel nursing is travel; someone can see the land while making money. In contrast, some of UPMC’s most heavily used hospitals are located in rural communities that are not tourist destinations. Lorenz doesn’t think this will discourage potential employees; She says many former UPMC nurses who resigned on travel assignments did so to pay off student loans.

“So our plan is to offer a competitive wage,” said Lorenz.

Nurses must have worked for at least a year before they can be accepted into the travel program.

The creation of the travel corps can strengthen UPMC’s employee relationships. There is often resentment among nurses when their hospitals pay significantly higher rates to temporary workers doing the same job. Dependency on recruitment agencies was a major complaint raised by Altoona Hospital nurses during the system Demonstration this week.

Sandy Wagner, an intensive care nurse in Altoona, told WESA News that while she doesn’t know all the details about the new travel corps, “I know UPMC needs to work and invest with us to keep experienced nurses at the bedside” . in long-term solutions and not in temporary solutions to cope with the personnel crisis that our hospital is facing. “

Lorenz says this is a long-term solution for UPMC that will last long after the COVID-19 pandemic ends.

In the short term, she expects that all UPMC hospitals will need travel staff. Current UPMC nurses and surgical technicians joining the travel corps will not be deployed to the location they are leaving for at least six months. Likewise, employees who leave for an external travel agency are not allowed to return to their previous place of work for a year.

Kiley Koscinski and Brett Sholtis contributed to this report.