PHOENIX (3TV / CBS 5) – Hospitals are currently struggling with staffing levels – and the looming holiday season worries healthcare workers that there aren’t enough staff available to keep up with COVID-19 patients and other illnesses. As a result, hospitals are now desperately trying to get travel nurses here. But it’s easier said than done.
Hospital workers want one thing: to be prepared for winter, they need more staff. “In some intensive care units in the Valley, nurses are still stretched three to one,” said Dr. Sam Durrani, chief of staff and surgeon at several Valley hospitals. “In the past two to three weeks we’ve seen a sharp increase in hospital admissions, especially in the last week.”
“In the past two to three weeks we’ve seen a sharp increase in hospital admissions, especially in the last week,” said Dr. Sam Durrani.
Durrani said burnout among nurses leaving the job is not helping with their staffing problems. “States that have done badly and with which we previously competed for resources are not in this situation, so I think it’s important right now to take this opportunity in Arizona and detain travel nurses,” said Durrani.
“The problem is, there is currently a national shortage,” said Ann-Marie Alameddin, president and CEO of the Arizona Hospital and Healthcare Association. She said the hospitals are working with recruitment agencies to hire the travel nurses, but they are already so in demand that it can be difficult to find.
Because travel nurses are so popular, they have a choice of which hospital they pay the most to.
And that leads to another problem. “The problem we’ve been seeing lately is that hospitals may have a contract with a recruiting agency for a number of nurses and those nurses just won’t show up for their assignment,” Alameddin said.
Since travel nurses are in such high demand, they have a choice of which hospital they pay the most to and earn extremely high salaries for weeks or months when they are deployed. “You could have nurses, traveling nurses who make double, if not triple, what a bedside nurse could make,” Alameddin said. “Where it might have been $ 50 an hour for a traveling nurse, we have maybe over $ 200 an hour for a traveling nurse.”
Arizona’s largest healthcare system, Banner Health, has nearly 1,400 nurses.
Dr. Durrani said at the moment 90% of her COVID-19 patients in the hospital are unvaccinated. But it’s not just the likely COVID-19 spike that healthcare workers are concerned about, it’s the winter flu that they expect.
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