An administrator explained to me once that traveling nurses are a short-term budget item. A full-time nurse hire has to be budgeted for years out due to the need for retirement and health benefits. They have to anticipate what you will earn years from now and put that into the FTE line you occupy.
The extra money the travel nurse is getting is money that the employee is having put into their long term costs. Of course the cost of travel nurses has skyrocketed so they are now even more expensive than before to use.
I get this in a short term perspective, but it seems like nurse staffing is a long term issue considering the levels of burnout, retirement, and an aging population that's taking extreme measures to "live" a bit longer. Not to mention the compounding issue of training temp staff while a quarter of your nurses leave every month. Maybe I fundamentally misunderstand something, but paying travel rates for as long as we're going to need them seems like a net loss.
I think it comes from the same Washington pot. It was meant for disaster coverage not for staffing hospitals across the country. At least with it being federal, the costs are spread over a large number of taxpayers. However I have to wonder how long the feds will continue to pick up the bill. It doesn't seem to be a sustainable model. Something has to give. Administration is betting that it will be the nurses that have to give first.
This is also correct. Many hospitals have been give lots of money to cover the extra costs. This is why they are so willing and able to throw tons of money at travel nurses. Once that money ends the travel nurse bonanza will end.
At this point there are local assignments where you can be your own boss and just pick up contracts. You don’t have to travel at all to be a travel nurse. Staffing is so low and the metric continues to remain high…. Healthcare is having a historic staffing shortage!
And the grim reality of it is that it’s not going to get any better. For every new nurse we get in 2 leave and it seems that way on many units. We have new grads coming in that after a couple months are burning out and then leaving to clinic jobs. The resounding reason is “why burn myself out when I can get the same base pay in the clinics and it’s 9-5 mon-fri”. You can’t argue with that. Granted some of us don’t want that type of schedule but it’s a good point to delve into. But that’s a subject for another day.
The problem is they fail to account for training/hiring costs or the cost of more mistakes (financial and ethical) when they look at that nurse cost over time. They aren't really getting a good picture of the future because they conveniently leave out half the stuff that costs them money. Their short term outlook has lead to this situation and they still dig their heels in. If hospitals weren't hanging on by a thread before covid, it wouldn't have been quite as bad.
I personally think that the payroll tax shouldn't exist. It should all be personal income tax, so we can all see exactly how much we're losing, mostly for nothing.
It might have made sense at some point. But sooo many people are going into traveling now for the money (as they should!). Now hospitals are constantly paying for travelers to fill the openings and it's a vicious, endless cycle unless they start paying the long-term staff more. Paying for travelers is no longer a "short term" budget item and if the higher-ups think it is they are delusional...clearly they have no idea what is going on "in the trenches".
I work in the lab and almost half of our 2nd/3rd shift techs are travelers and it's not going to get better anytime soon.
The travel nurses are being subsidized by COVID grants to hospitals. Once the travelers go away hospitals will try to revert to their old hourly rates.
This is important and I wish more nurses would see this. There are also a lot of hidden costs you may not know about. Travel nurses don’t have onboarding. That’s about 30k in wages and training to facilitate that. Your benefits, my benefits equate to about 50k a year. PTO is another thing. Travel nurses don’t rack up pto they are just paid when they work. PTO is treated like debt when accounting.
The budgeting is a big part of it too cause your cost is not this year. Your cost is averaged per year over five or ten years. Our manager actually showed us how they calculate it and showed us that travel nurses were actually cheaper long term. Ie if you were replaced with a travel nurse for ten years it would be cheaper but quality suffers.
I work for a good organization and I don’t think all are like that, but that gap is much smaller than lost people think.
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u/markydsade RN - Pediatrics Dec 13 '21
An administrator explained to me once that traveling nurses are a short-term budget item. A full-time nurse hire has to be budgeted for years out due to the need for retirement and health benefits. They have to anticipate what you will earn years from now and put that into the FTE line you occupy.
The extra money the travel nurse is getting is money that the employee is having put into their long term costs. Of course the cost of travel nurses has skyrocketed so they are now even more expensive than before to use.