• Email Address: hello@greenkeyllc.com
  • Phone Number: 888-368-5336
Submit Your Resume
Home › Healthcare › Demand for Nurses Is Pushing Travel Pay Sky High

Demand for Nurses Is Pushing Travel Pay Sky High

06Jun
Green KeyHealthcare

This fall’s surge in COVID cases is creating a nationwide “bidding war” for nurses so intense that pay is soaring as high as $8,000 and $10,000 a week.

According to a report by Kaiser Health News, “The fall surge in COVID cases has turned hospital staffing into a sort of national bidding war, with hospitals willing to pay exorbitant wages to secure the nurses they need.”

In South Dakota, hospitals are paying nurses $6,200 a week. A hospital in Fargo, North Dakota advertised more than $8,000 a week.

“Calling the labor market for registered nurses ‘cutthroat’ is an understatement,” said Adam Seth Litwin, an associate professor of industrial and labor relations at Cornell University. “Even if the health care sector can somehow find more beds, it cannot just go out and buy more front-line caregivers.”

Nurses have long been among the hardest jobs to fill. In 2018, a Moody’s Investor Service report said the shortage of nurses had become so critical it was threatening hospital finances. A few months earlier, Reuters reported that to fill nursing shortages hospitals were spending $4.8 billion annually on travel nurses, twice what they were spending three years before.

With COVID patients flooding hospitals nationwide, demand for nurses has now become so intense that pay is skyrocketing, prompting long-time staff nurses to join the ranks of travel nurses. These contract workers fill temporary positions before traveling to another temporary nursing job.

David Deane, senior vice president of a travel nurse job board, estimates there are at least 50,000 travel nurses today, a jump from the 31,000 in 2018. One large specialty staffing firm says it added 1,000 nurses to its “reservist” roster just over the Halloween weekend.

Many of these new travel nurses are coming from rural and small hospitals that can’t afford to match the pay offered elsewhere.

“That is a huge threat,” Angelina Salazar, CEO of the Western Healthcare Alliance told Kaiser Health News. The alliance is a consortium of 29 small hospitals in rural Colorado and Utah. “There’s no way rural hospitals can afford to pay that kind of salary,” she said.

That’s hastening a “brain drain” of nurses, said Tessa Johnson, president of the North Dakota Nurses Association, and not only to hospitals in metro areas, but internationally too.

“We’ve sent nurses to Aruba, the Bahamas and Curacao because they’ve needed help with COVID,” said Deane. “You’re going down there, you’re making $5,000 a week and all your expenses are paid, right? Who’s not gonna say yes?”

Photo by Jakayla Toney on Unsplash

[bdp_post_carousel]

Related Post

Healthcare, Worklife
Jun 6, 2023

The Importance of Confidence for Women Healthcare Leaders

Healthcare, Worklife
Jun 6, 2023

The Importance of Confidence for Women Healthcare Leaders

Women may hold three-quarters of all healthcare jobs, yet only 37% of the executives at the nation’s largest hospitals are female. The percentage is smaller still at Fortune 500 healthcare companies where less than a quarter of executive jobs are held by women.

What can women who aspire to healthcare leadership do to change that?

Act with confidence, says Dr. Joanne Conroy CEO and president of Dartmouth-Hitchcock Health and founder of Women of Impact — Healthcare.

In a podcast discussion, Conroy described the importance of communication – confident communication — in reaching the top tiers of healthcare administration.

“When women present an idea, a concept, or something in kind of a strategy session, they often weaken their points by using qualifiers by saying, ‘I’ve been thinking about this,’ or, ‘Would you think about it?’ instead of giving their opinion with confidence,” Conroy says.

Part of the reason for that approach, she says, is cultural. Women are brought up to emphasize relationships more than self. “They make things happen by being flexible,” Conroy says, adding there’s a time to be flexible and “a time to be firm and confident.”

There’s also a sort of tentativeness in how women present that arises from a lack of confidence in their own ideas. “When sometimes they don’t get credit for their ideas,” says Conroy, it’s “because they don’t present them in a way that makes people stop and say, ‘Wow that was a great idea.’”

Conroy recalled counseling women considering a step up, but hesitated to apply because they felt they weren’t completely prepared. “If there are 10 job requirements, [but] if they have nine of them, they’ll say, ‘Well, I’m not ready.’ But there are many men that have two of them and say, ‘That job is for me!’”

Her advice is to observe the women around them to learn from those who are good communicators. Use the power of silence, she says. “I do observe women that are making a pitch and use 100 words when they should use 25,” she explains. “There’s nothing more powerful than a very direct, simple opinion [or a] request followed by silence.”

How something is presented demands practice. Conroy says she’s spent “hours in front of bathroom mirrors making sure that what I wanted to come out of my mouth came out of my mouth.“

In the end, she says, “It’s all about confidence… [be] confident, articulate, and memorable.”

Photo by CDC on Unsplash

[bdp_post_carousel]

Read Continue
 
Required 'Candidate' login to applying this job. Click here to logout And try again
 
 

Answers

 

Account Activation

Before you can login, you must activate your account with the code sent to your email address. If you did not receive this email, please check your junk/spam folder. Click here to resend the activation email. If you entered an incorrect email address, you will need to re-register with the correct email address.