U.S. hospitals hit with nurse staffing crisis as coronavirus cases climb

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

The problem, health leaders say, is twofold: Nurses are quitting or retiring, exhausted or demoralized by the crisis. And many are leaving for lucrative temporary jobs with travellingnurse agencies that can pay $5,000 or more a week.

“It’s gotten to the point where doctors are saying: ‘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 seen up to 20 to 30 resignations in a week from nurses taking travelling jobs. “And then we have to pay premium rates to get staff from another state to come to our state,” Coule said.

The average pay for a travelling nurse has soared from roughly $1,000 to $2,000 US 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 travelling 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.

Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly lamented recently 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.

In Kansas City, Missouri, Truman Medical Centers 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.

“I think clearly people are taking advantage of the demand that is out there,” Shields said. “I hate to use ‘gouged’ as a description, but we are clearly paying a premium and allowing people to have fairly high profit margins.”

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 travelling contract, said Carrie Kroll, a vice-president at the Texas Hospital Association.

“The nurses who haven’t left, who have stayed with their facilities, they are seeing these other people come in now who are making more money. It provides a tense working environment,” Kroll said.