Going where they are needed most
Traveling nurses aid hospital staffs sapped by the virus
As the coronavirus cut a devastating path around the country, Laura Liffiton found herself racing along behind.
She arrived in New York City in April, on one of the worst days of the pandemic, for a stint as a nurse in the overrun intensive-care unit of a crowded hospital. After her contract there ended, she flew in July to another hot spot with an urgent need for nurses: a hospital in Arizona where four of her patients died of the coronavirus on her first day. In October, Liffiton traveled on, to Green Bay, Wisconsin, just as the viruswas surging uncontrollably throughout the Midwest.
“Whenthe pandemic began, I thought, ‘I’m going to go help, I can do some good, I can make some good money,’ ” she said. But on the first day of treating coronavirus patients, Liffiton, 32, remembered, “Iwas like Dorothy landing in Oz. Iwas totally unprepared for the reality.”
As the coronavirus has spiked across the country, travel nurses, who work on temporary contracts for higher fees and move from city to city, have become more urgently needed than ever.
As hospitals fill with virus patients, the biggest need has been finding enough staff to tend to the critically ill. Demand for travel nurses has increased by more than 40% in the past month, according to Aya Healthcare, an agency based in California that dispatches them to hospitals. At least 25,000 nurses work in travel nursing, though the number fluctuates, and hospitals have depended on them for decades.
It is a nomadic existence
and, in a pandemic, a particularly high-risk one. The nurses parachute into cities for weeks or months at a time, quickly learning the ways of a new hospital and trying to earn the trust of the existing staff.
At the end of their shifts, they return to their temporary homes: hotels, Airbnb apartments or rented houses. Their families and friends are sometimes thousands of miles away, available only through phone calls or FaceTime.
Last week in Green Bay, where the surrounding county has averaged more than 150 cases a day since late September, a team of four travel nursesworked at Bellin Hospital, grappling with the unrelenting pressure of the emergency room and a Thanksgiving holiday far from home.
More than eight months into the pandemic, many travel nurses have done little else but treat
COVID-19 patients.
Liffiton still shudders when recounting what she saw in New York in April: doctors and nurses who were overwhelmed, rows of intubated patients and little sense of when the devastationwould end.
She still sleeps only about four hours a night, troubled by what she has seen throughout the pandemic.
“It’s hard,” she said. “Even after I leave a place, the feelings stay.”
Morgan Fitzsimmons, a travel nurse based in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, has been treating coronavirus patients since a stint working in Syracuse, New York, in July. InGreen Bay, where she is temporarily based, theweather has nowturned cold and blustery. Some people are still gathering indoors, going to bars and to restaurants andweddings.
“The hospital’s getting tight,” said Fitzsimmons, who is 26. “Half of your
patients that you’re going to see in a day more than likely have COVID or are getting tested for COVID. They’re coming in and getting tested. They go home and then they get sicker and they come back.”
The treatment options have improved since her work in Syracuse this summer. But the skepticism surrounding the virus in places like Green Bay has only deepened, she said.
Just before the election, Fitzsimmons said, she was treating a patient who repeated a conspiracy theory that has circulated on the internet and in conservative media: The coronavirus is a hoaxperpetuatedbyDemocrats.
“I’m taking care of this man and he said, ‘I can’t wait for the election to be over so all this will all go away,’ ” she said. “And I’m like, ‘That’s not happening. It’s real, I promise you, it’s real.’ ”
Others have all but shrugged when they receive a positive coronavirus result.
“A lot of people tend to have the response, when they’re told they have it, they’re like, ‘Oh, I’ve got the COVID,’ ” saidHeather Ozmun, 46, a travel nurse in Green Bay. “They’re treating it like a rite of passage, like it’s their turn to have it.”
John Deaton, 27, has spent most of his nursing career as a traveler, as they are commonly called.
Throughout the pandemic, he has treated COVID-19 patients and even caught a mild case of the virus himself, working in El Centro, California; Sacramento, California; and nowGreen Bay.
Places to stay in northeastern Wisconsin were difficult to find. He settled for renting the basement in a house while the owner lives upstairs, negotiating
for shareduseof the kitchen so hewould have more than a microwave to use for cooking.
Deaton, who is from Akron, Ohio, was attracted to travel nursing because it pays sowell— he estimated that he makes four times what he would earn if he accepted a staff position somewhere. There is a range of pay for such work, but a weekly paycheck could be more than $5,000 during the pandemic, by some of the nurses’ estimates, in addition to benefits.
The dynamic between staff nurses and travel nurses can be complicated. Deaton said that when he was in Sacramento, staff nurses were given higherquality equipment to use, such as air-purifying respirators, that travel nurses had to repeatedly request.
“We’re here because they have a need,” he said of hospitals.