Higher wages encourage caregivers to take up travel nurses, further understaffing their previous employers, creating tension between carers and raising questions about the implications for the quality of care.
While travel nurse contracts often don’t include the same services as employed nurses, the higher hourly wage is an attractive compromise for many, especially as COVID-19 overwhelms hospitals in some states, increasing the need for nurses and driving up compensation costs.
Financially sound hospitals can pay travel nurses between $ 6,000 and $ 10,000 a week, often along with a grant to cover housing and travel expenses.
“Travel nursing essentially started a bidding war between hospitals,” said Dr. Phillip Coule, Vice President and Chief Medical Officer of the Health System at Augusta University in Augusta, Georgia. “A nurse can leave an establishment, get a ‘travel contract’ to an establishment across the street, and earn more than double her income while still at home.”
In turn, rising demand and scarce labor have resulted in rapidly rising pay, said Kathy Kohnke, senior vice president of client relations at Fastaff Travel Nursing.
But when hospitals offer these higher wages, it can exacerbate staffing problems in hospitals with fewer resources that may not match compensation for nurses elsewhere, Coule said.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, the the urgent need for travel nurses Closing staff gaps has increased dramatically. According to medical recruitment agency Aya Healthcare, demand is 284% higher than at that time last year.
With the delta variant driving up COVID-19 case numbers, more than 40,000 travel nurse positions are now available every day, Kohnke said.
In 2020, 90% of hospital managers hired travel nurses to reinforce their teams during the pandemic. In the previous year, before COVID-19 arrived in the US, according to a. less than 60% travel nurses Survey 2021 of 100 executives through the Avant Healthcare Professionals recruitment agency.
“The Delta Virus is creating even more competition for scarce talent, and our customers are citing retention issues as well as retention issues,” said Susan Salka, CEO of recruitment agency AMN Healthcare, in a statement. “The demand was made more difficult by absenteeism, fatigue of the clinic staff, increasing patient numbers and backlogs in the operating room – and our customers tell us that this will not change in the foreseeable future.”
In addition to a higher salary, travel positions offer nurses an easier way to support their families, pay off student loan debt, and avoid excessive burnout through more flexible planning, according to a spokesman for the American Nurses Association.
Travel nursing should be a short-term solution in areas of critical need, the ANA spokesman said. But under the current circumstances, the demand for medical care has overwhelmed all caregivers, both salaried and contracted carers.
As nurses become increasingly upset with working conditions and frustrated with employers over long-standing labor shortages, pandemic vacation, and wage differentials between staff and travel nurses, this drives them away, said Patricia Pittman, professor of health policy and management at the School of Public Health at the George Washington University.
“The good thing about travel nursing is that in the event of natural disasters or very infrequent demand, hospitals can use travel nurses to fill in the gaps,” said Pittman. “The bad side of travel nursing is that it becomes an excuse not to invest in your regular nursing staff. It’s a double-edged sword. ”This can fuel resentment among caregivers, who have had a heavy burden since the beginning of last year.
Offering bonuses to attract travel nurses, not employees, is a “slap in the face,” says Kelly Rivera-Craine, business agent for Teamsters Local 332 and registered nurse at Ascension Genesys Hospital in Grand Blanc, Michigan.
Salaried nurses should receive better treatment after remaining loyal to their employers, torturing themselves through the pandemic, and enduring under-staffing when hospitals violate nurse-to-patient rules, Rivera-Craine said.
Hiring travel nurses can also disrupt workflow and clinical care as they typically don’t receive as much training from their temporary employers as nurses and don’t stay long enough to develop relationships with patients, Rivera-Craine said.
A nurse who has worked in a hospital for eight weeks may not have the same understanding of the facility’s processes, patients, and issues as a long-tenure nurse, Coule said. “If you are replacing team members, it certainly has the potential to affect the quality of care,” he said. “The potential for error in communication problems will most likely increase.” Last month, 40 full-time nurses resigned from the University of Augusta health care system, attracted by high-paying jobs for travel nurses, said Coule. “As soon as we can get traveling nurses, we are losing staff to travel contracts,” he said
At some hospitals, turnover is so high that the majority of the department is made up of travel nurses for a few shifts, said Matt Calzia, a nursing practice advisor with the Oregon Nurses Association. Another disadvantage of hospitals hiring travel nurses from across the country is worsening staffing shortages in rural and underserved areas that have fewer resources and host disadvantaged communities with poor access to health care, Calzia said. And these are the hospitals that can least afford to get workers back, he said.
“They perpetuate the disparities within the health system as a whole,” said Calzia. “We’re taking nurses from areas that really need nurses but don’t pay so well and moving them to areas that may be better paid and that really need nurses.”
Due to unsustainable travel sickness benefits, the American Hospital Association asked the Federal Trade Commission in February to investigate reports of nurse recruitment agencies. anti-competitive prices.
As travel nursing has become unaffordable for some hospitals, more and more are beginning to realize that it was a mistake to take nurses off instead of investing in them and treating them as key employees, Pittman said.
Employers have been reluctant to listen to the nurses’ calls for help and offer practically meaningless bonuses and wellness workshops instead of addressing the systemic issues that make nursing so challenging, Pittman said.
“The silver lining of this crisis is that it is forcing nurses and hospital managers to take the nurses’ situation much more seriously,” said Pittman.
