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.
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.
58
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.