Amid surge in COVID-19 cases, US hospitals hit with nurse staffing crisis

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has created a crisis in nurse staff that is forcing many US hospitals to pay top dollar to get the help they need to handle the crush of patients this summer.

According to health leaders, the problem is twofold: Nurses are quitting or retiring, exhausted or demoralized by the crisis. And many are leaving for lucrative temporary jobs with traveling-nurse agencies that can pay $5,000 or more a week, The Associated Press reported.

“Maybe I should quit being a doctor and go be a nurse,” said Dr Phillip Coule, chief medical officer at Georgia’s Augusta University Medical Center, which has on occasion seen 20 to 30 resignations in a week from nurses taking traveling jobs.

“And then we have to pay premium rates to get staff from another state to come to our state,” Coule said.

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The average pay for a traveling nurse has soared from roughly $1,000 to $2,000 per week before the pandemic to $3,000 to $5,000 now, said Sophia Morris, a vice president at San Diego-based health care staffing firm Aya Healthcare. She said Aya has 48,000 openings for traveling nurses to fill.

At competitor SimpliFi, President James Quick said the hospitals his company works with are seeing unprecedented levels of vacancies.

“Small to medium-sized hospitals generally have dozens of full-time openings, and the large health systems have hundreds of full-time openings,” he said.

The explosion in pay has made it hard on hospitals without deep enough pockets.

Recently, Kansas Governor Laura Kelly lamented that the state’s hospitals risk being outbid for nurses by other states that pay a “fortune”. She said Wednesday that several hospitals, including one in Topeka, had open beds but no nurses to staff them.

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In recent days, Truman Medical Centres in Kansas City, Missouri, has lost about 10 nurses to travel jobs in recent days and is looking for travelers to replace them, said CEO Charlie Shields.

He said it is hard to compete with the travel agencies, which are charging hospitals $165 to $170 an hour per nurse. He said the agencies take a big cut of that, but he estimated that nurses are still clearing $70 to $90 an hour, which is two to three times what the hospital pays its staff nurses.

In Texas, more than 6,000 travel nurses have flooded the state to help with the surge through a state-supported program. But on the same day that 19 of them went to work at a hospital in the northern part of the state, 20 other nurses at the same place gave notice that they would be leaving for a traveling contract, said Carrie Kroll, a vice president at the Texas Hospital Association.