Traveling Nurses Triple Salaries As Hospitals Struggle With National Staffing Crisis
For some reason, hospitals around the country can’t seem to hire enough staff nurses, which has led to a boom in demand for so-called “traveling” nurses who sign 13-week contracts and earn many times the pay they would for working full time.
Nurses have been complaining about this dynamic on social media for months now, as thousands of full-time nurses complain that they’re bearing the brunt of staffing shortages while not being fairly compensated. But finally it appears the Washington Post has caught on, publishing a report on soaring demand for traveling nurses. As WaPo explains, if 2020 was the year travel nursing took off, with 35% growth over the pre-pandemic year of 2019, this year has propelled it to new heights, with an additional 40% growth expected. WaPo says it got its number from an “independent” analysis of the health-care workforce in the US.
Traveling nurses are a hot issue in the pandemic health-care scene in the US. As an aging, burned-out and retiring nurse workforce saw unprecedented rates of employees retiring after the 2020 horrorshow, the return of hospital services that were shut down last year and a shortage of foreign recruits and nursing students have combined to leave hospitals desperately short staffed on the nursing front.
“Of all the things that keep CEOs of hospitals up at night, this is the key one,” said Chip Kahn, president and chief executive of the Federation of American Hospitals, which represents about 1,000 for-profit facilities.- READ MORE
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