City’s public hosps pay $1.2B on travel nurses

New York City’s public hospital system paid a single company $1.2 billion to contract temporary travel nurses and other healthcare staff — sparking outrage at the state nurses’ union — according to previously unreported data obtained by the Daily News.

NYC Health + Hospitals awarded the contract to a workforce management company called Rightsourcing to pay for temporary traveling healthcare staff in fiscal year 2022.

The new numbers come as outrage has mounted at the NY State Nurses Association — which is pushing for higher pay in contract negotiations with the city — after Health+Hospitals said it spent $549 million on temporary travel nurse contracts in the calendar year 2022.

“It would cost the city hundreds of millions of dollars less to raise wages for staff nurses at our public hospitals and mayoral agencies so that nurses can afford to stay at the bedside, where we want to be,” said Sonia Lawrence, a nurse at Lincoln Hospital and member of the union’s contract negotiating team.

Lawrence slammed the spending, saying the “shocking amount of money” could have been used to help problems of understaffing and high turnover rates in the city’s hospitals.

Health + Hospitals did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

According to a NYSNA estimate, the new numbers, which are outlined in the year’s procurement report for the city’s public hospital system, mean H+H spent about $1.3 billion total on temporary staffing in fiscal year 2022.

The union says these numbers show that the city can afford to pay its staff nurses more and achieve pay parity with nurses at private hospitals in a new contract.

Public sector nurses in New York City make nearly $20,000 less than those working for private hospitals, according to the union.

The travel nurses typically get paid more than permanent staff, which has become a sore point between the union nurses and the hospital system. There are about 2,000 temporary nurses working across H+H hospitals.

Since the COVID outbreak, hospitals have relied heavily on travel nurses to help treat patients. The practice took off when infection rates were high and has persisted through the frequent staffing shortages that have followed, including the nurses strike at Montefiore Medical Center and Mount Sinai earlier this year.