With travel nurses making $150 an hour, hospital systems are forced to innovate

Cassie Jupin grew up desirous to be a nurse. She set her sights on a job at St. Peter’s Health Partners hospital in Albany, New York, and landed a place in the identical maternity ward the place she was born.

“Knowing that I can come back to work every single day and work with a group of women and people that just make it so easy” has been gratifying, Jupin stated. “Like, everybody’s here to help you.”

Still, when she graduated from nursing faculty final July, she and her classmates joked about taking journey nurse jobs which paid much more than entry-level workers positions.

“They were up in like the $140s, $150s, depending on the area you were searching,” she defined. The pay wasn’t per day. It was per hour.  

Over the final 12 months, holding nurses like Jupin on workers has ranked as essentially the most urgent workforce concern for 90% of CEOs at neighborhood hospitals like St. Peter’s, in accordance with a survey by the American College of Healthcare Executives.

The pandemic has exacerbated nursing workers shortages and resulted in contract nursing charges surging throughout successive waves of Covid infections. During the omicron surge within the winter of 2022, nationwide charges spiked to a median of $150 an hour, in accordance with consulting agency Syntellis. That amounted to a few occasions the nationwide common for full-time workers nurses.  

As hospitals have change into more and more reliant on contract nurses, journey nurse expenditures have risen greater than 250% for the reason that begin of the pandemic.

“There continues to be significant volatility in hourly wages paid to registered nurses, which represent a significant share of overall labor costs,” stated Flint Brenton, CEO of Syntellis Performance Solutions.

At the identical time, utilizing high-paid staff from travel-nursing businesses additionally made for a vicious circle in terms of staffing.

“Agency staff were paid significant salary rates and had complete control of their work schedules,” defined Carol Boston Fleischhauer, managing director and chief nursing officer on the Advisory Board, and as outcome “more in-house nurses left their permanent positions for external opportunities, increasing turnover.”

St. Peter’s is a part of Trinity Health System, which has not been proof against the necessity for contract nursing. But Trinity has been in a position to have extra management over workers turnover by utilizing its personal in-house journey nurse program — an concept that stemmed from its personal nurses over a decade in the past.

“We realized that if we developed our own internal agency, if you will, we could orient people to Trinity Health for all of our hospitals,” stated Jennifer Misajet, chief nursing officer at St. Peter’s hospital.  

That inside program, referred to as First Choice, grew threefold throughout the pandemic, as older nurses appeared to cut back from full-time work, and youthful nurses sought increased pay and better flexibility over their working situations. 

“It’s not like the old days where nurses became inpatient nurses for 30 years. A lot of new graduates expect to work in an inpatient setting for only a few years, and then they want to get their master’s degree, or become nurse practitioners,” stated Trinity CEO Mike Slubowski.

With almost 90 hospitals in 26 states, First Choice has helped Trinity have higher management over its contract nursing prices, whereas additionally sustaining ties with nurses who may help them preserve a constant high quality of care.

“If they wanted to work in a different location, for example, go to Fresno, California, or Boise, Idaho, to cover, you know, we have the same clinical information system everywhere … and so there’s a familiarity with providing care within that environment,” Slubowski stated.

With greater than 30,000 registered nurses in its system, almost 1 in 10 of Trinity’s nurses at the moment work by way of First Choice. That now consists of a few dozen senior leaders like Misajet at St. Peter’s.

“We really tried to meet our nurses where they are, and they’re in different places,” Misajet stated. In her case, she’s gone part-time quite than retire, as a way to spend extra time together with her household.   

Analysts say extra hospitals are following Trinity’s lead and beginning their very own inside staffing packages to chop down on company contract labor prices. At the identical time, they’re additionally going through increased prices to carry on to their full-time workers nurses. Trinity boosted workers salaries by 5.5% in 2022, in accordance with its newest monetary statements.

For new nurses like Jupin, who could be tempted by high-paying journey nurse jobs, the message from hospital management is evident.  

“They don’t want to see you walk away — especially our manager,” the maternity nurse stated. “The first thing she’s always told us is ‘please come to us if you need anything, because we want you guys here for the long run.'”

Better pay and staffing situations stay the highest considerations for many nurses, in accordance with a current survey by the American Nurses Association, however for greater than half of them, flexibility can be key. Increasingly, it is proving to be key for hospital techniques like Trinity, too.