Family glad to be reunited after mom’s time in NYC
Nurse spent two months caring for some of the Big Apple’s sickest COVID-19 patients
SAN ANTONIO — When San Antonio family nurse practitioner Teresa Beard arrived in New York City on Easter, it wasn’t at all the metropolis she remembered from previous visits.
No honking taxicabs or crowds of people on the streets.
“It was like the city was sad,” she said.
Beard spent two months working overnight shifts at a COVID-19 intensive care unit inside a New York-Presbyterian Hospital in Brooklyn. She was one of thousands of nurses in the U.S. who have taken temporary jobs in virus hot spots during the pandemic.
Beard signed the contract because she thought it was in her family’s best financial interest. But she also had felt a tug when she saw how overwhelmed hospitals in New York City boroughs were early in the outbreak. She remembers coming across a photo online of hospital staff wheeling five or six body bags into a truck parked on the street.
“To lose just one patient is hard,” she said, “but to lose the patients at the rate that they were losing them, my heart broke for the nurses.”
In mid-March, the travel health care industry — in which nurses and other medical personnel take temporary positions in cities where the demand for their skills exceeds the local supply — saw a surge in requests for additional staff, especially in New York and Washington states.
Average pay rates for assignments increased by 76 percent — and so did interest among nurses willing to take these crisis-response jobs, according to a report on recruitment trends by the website TravelNurseSource.
Travel nurses can normally make well over $100,000 per
year, with offers that may include housing, meal stipends, uniform reimbursement, bonuses, health insurance and 401(k) benefits.
Usually employed by a staffing agency, a travel nurse typically works 13-week assignments. But they are sometimes offered shorter terms to fill shortages during a labor strike or natural disaster.
Executives with the industry’s largest staffing agency, Dallasbased AMN Healthcare Services, said during an earnings call that at least 10,000 health care professionals had been deployed through its brands since midMarch.
Revenue for the company’s travel nurse business is up about 25 percent from last year.
But this increase likely reflects huge rate increases during the crisis, not volume, according to an analyst with Staffing Industry Analysts, a firm based in Mountain View, Calif.
Higher-margin procedures such as elective surgeries were canceled during governmentmandated lockdowns, which more than offset any pandemic-related demand in the sector.
Beard, 35, returned to her far Northeast Side home in late May. She injured her back and was allowed to return a few days before her contract ended.
The mother of three returned to a surprise party, a small, Fiestathemed gathering that included her favorite tacos, which she couldn’t find in New York. The home was decorated with several hand-drawn posters made by her daughters, Lillian, 15, and Alexis, 7.
Holding her 3-month-old son, Nolan, she said, “He’s so much bigger now. I missed this.”
Her husband, Brandon Beard, 35, said the past few weeks with their newborn had been tough.
The couple’s roommate, a medical worker at University Hospital, often watched the baby when Brandon was at work, and sometimes their oldest daughter took care of her brother so her father could catch up on sleep.
“The kids were on edge. They squabbled a lot,” he said. “That was the biggest transition for us. I could do laundry all day, but when they need to talk to someone, they had to FaceTime her.”
The couple met in nursing school at St. Philips College before marrying in 2010. As a surgical trauma nurse at San Antonio Military Medical Center at Joint Base San Antonio-Fort Sam Houston, he said he could understand why she took the job.
In New York, Teresa Beard worked at a 25-bed psychiatric unit that had been turned into an ICU. When she arrived, she was responsible for treating four critically ill patients with little support.
Most of her patients had been hospitalized for several weeks and were medically unstable, she said. The hospital’s iPads were often used to call her patient’s family so that they could say their goodbyes.
“I personally did not see any patients go home and get better,” she said. “It wears on you. It’s taking its toll.”
She knew the heartache of losing so many patients came with the job, as did the increased risk of contracting the virus. Still, the eight-week contract with a major agency for 46 hours a week was too lucrative to pass up.
The family’s car had recently broken down, and she was still looking for work after having the baby. She feared not being able to bring in income with the economy in turmoil and the unemployment rate climbing.
The staffing agency put her up in a Manhattan hotel, and her transportation expenses were covered. She was also paid a higher hourly rate, in the low $70s, because of her 13 years of clinical experience and doctorate in nursing.
She hoped the compensation would be enough to make the family’s sacrifices worth it.
In the beginning, it was. But toward the end, as the pandemic stabilized in New York, she wasn’t allowed to work overtime. She went from caring for four patients per shift to two critically ill patients per shift.
At least half of her patients died from the disease.
“She was surrounded by so much death. I can’t imagine what that must be like,” Brandon Beard said.
Unlike other major cities, San Antonio hasn’t been overwhelmed by a surge of COVID-19 patients, due at least in part to the stay-at-home orders issued by city and county and state officials.
The military hospital where Brandon Beard works was prepared for the worst, but didn’t see the numbers they expected.
Still, SAMMC sent 35 nurses and a few doctors to New York City to join a team that turned a Manhattan convention center into a COVID-19-free overflow facility. They’ve all safely returned, officials said.
Teresa said she’ll never forget her first shift at the hospital in Brooklyn. She introduced herself to another nurse, who started crying.
“She said my being there meant she didn’t have to come back the next day after working 11 straight 12-hour shifts,” Beard said.