Hospitals up pay to entice nurses to take extra shifts amid delta
Staffing needs CLEVELAND — have become so stretched during the coronavirus crisis, especially with the lingering delta variant, that some hospitals are offering incentive pay that could result in nurses earning thousands of extra dollars.
For example, starting Sunday, some Cleveland Clinic nurses are now being offered pay of close to $1,400 for selected 12-hour shifts through Nov. 6.
With a new $400-a-day bonus, a nurse normally paid $35 an hour would earn a total of $1,390 a day with overtime and other bonuses for certain 12-hour shifts, according to an example in a Clinic pay policy document. Actual pay would differ among nurses as $35 was cited as an example for the base rate, before bonuses, and the new, extra bonus applies only for nurses above full-time hours.
The initiative is called the RN Shift Incentive Program, according to the document to employees dated Thursday.
To be eligible, nurses must be regular full- or part-time employees. Eligible locations include the hospital’s main campus in Cleveland, Avon, Fairview, Lutheran, Euclid, Hillcrest, Southpointe, Marymount and Medina.
A Clinic spokeswoman said Sunday that the hospital system does indeed offer premium pay and incentives based on need, but those vary due to factors like experience and shift.
“Like other health systems, we are experiencing staffing challenges for nursing and other positions,” the Clinic said in a statement. “We are continuously evaluating our workforce and looking at solutions to meet our caregiver needs while maintaining the highest quality care for our patients.”
The Clinic is not alone in making moves to cope with staffing issues.
MetroHealth instituted a “significantly enhanced premium pay schedule” in mid-October for those who work in departments with large nursing shortages. The incentive pay, available through early January, is on a sliding scale depending upon an employee’s base salary and how many extra hours per pay period they sign up to work, according to paperwork distributed to employees.
At the low end of the scale, if an employee picks up fewer than 8.5 additional hours in a pay period, they will earn 1.5-times their base pay. On the high end, employees who pick up more than 20.4 hours in a pay period will get five times their base pay.
According to an example in the MetroHealth pay policy document, an employee who works 40 hours per week (80 hours per pay period), normally makes $35 an hour and picks up three additional eight-hour shifts over two weeks (one pay period) would earn $7,000 in gross total wages in one pay period, instead of a normal rate of $2,800 for 80 hours.
Additionally, University Hospitals recently expanded a program to cope with the growing demand of nurses. The Helping Hands program, created in 2020 at the start of the pandemic was designed to encourage UH caregivers in nonclinical and clinical positions to volunteer to cover shifts that need workers.
The program is now in Phase 3 in which the hospital system is asking nurses who work in non-bedside care role to and help at the bedside, a spokesman said in an emailed response to questions on Saturday.
“The demands on our health care system are great, and participation in Helping Hands Phase 3 is necessary and mandatory. Participation is for an indefinite period of time as we work diligently to solve an urgent staffing shortage. The profession of nursing is a calling to care that is answered in many ways,” the statement said.
The spokesman said he could not speak to salary information on any level for employees.
These programs stem from the nursing shortage, a crisis that has plagued Ohio for months.
The surge of COVID-19 cases statewide became so bad that by the end of September, Gov. Mike DeWine said during a media briefing that medical professionals across the state were exhausted because staff shortages and lack of equipment — making it harder to care for patients.
Large academic medical centers were struggling to care for patients due to the national nursing shortage, Dr. Suzanne Bennett at the University of Cincinnati Health said during the DeWine briefing.
“It creates scenarios that no one wants to think about, where we do not have the space for patients who would otherwise benefit from receiving their care at these large academic medical centers,” Bennett said.
At about the same time, Akron’s Summa Health System announced plans to decrease its bed capacity by more than 20% at its Akron and Barberton campuses, due to staffing shortages and increased demand for healthcare services.
And the Cleveland Clinic at the time said it was moving patients among facilities and scheduling fewer nonessential surgeries requiring inpatient stay to cope with increased demand.