Average salaries for travel nurses have soared during the pandemic with average salaries plus benefits advertised on Arkansas travel nurse recruitment websites ranging from $1,600 to more than $3,000 per week. While travel nurses have been critical to meeting the unprecedented demand, the costs have been difficult for many hospital systems to absorb.
Chad Aduddell, CEO of CHI St. Vincent in Little Rock, said he has watched the health care workforce change across the country during the pandemic. The industry experienced an increase in retirement of health care workers with many leaving the workforce due to family obligations related to COVID-19.
“Those challenges have been compounded by the ongoing nursing shortage and lack of people going into health care fields,” Aduddell said. “Thankfully, we have been able to utilize traveling nurses to work alongside our employees to assist with patient care. With competitive demand, the average cost for temporary travel nurses has increased through the pandemic, in addition to the number of travel nurses our healing ministry and other health care institutions have had to rely upon.”
Aduddell said he is truly grateful for the service of travel nurses and their compassionate care that has helped through this difficult time. However, the rising cost of travel nurses on the scale CHI St. Vincent has had to rely upon is not sustainable for any healthcare institution long term, he added.
“We’ve been fortunate to have loyal nurses who understand the value of being part of our healing ministry and have been honored to welcome many traveling nurses who chose to leave traveling in order to join our ministry full time. We have also made significant investments in our full-time and part-time staff and nurses to ensure we are taking care of our own co-workers. CHI St. Vincent could not, nor any hospital for that matter, provide necessary care without our nurses and their colleagues who are called to this ministry.”
The demand for health care workers is higher than the current supply, and the pandemic has only increased the imbalance, according to Bo Ryall, president and CEO of the Arkansas Hospital Association.
“Arkansas hospitals are fortunate to have so many committed, capable and creative health care workers in our ranks; they are essential to our work of making Arkansas communities healthier,” he said. “The critical shortage of health care workers in Arkansas has been a growing problem for years but has become an acute issue during the COVID-19 pandemic. As COVID-19 surges stretched existing health care capacity, many hospitals had to rely upon contract workers to meet the increased need.”
Ryall said the “great resignation” hit health care in 2021. In August alone, 534,000 health care workers left their jobs to take another, leave health care or retire.
“This imbalance, and the growing reliance upon travel agencies, increased hospital labor costs by 15 to 20 percent in 2021 compared to 2020, and they are expected to increase even more in 2022,” Ryall said. “This has created a perfect storm of increased costs and limited staffing at a time when hospitals are already stretched. We believe that a variety of approaches to addressing the health care worker shortage should be simultaneously pursued, including federal programs to provide scholarships and loan forgiveness for health care education, investing in nursing workforce development programs, lifting the cap on Medicare-funded physician residencies, expediting visas for all highly trained, foreign health-care workers and preventing burnout through targeted investments that address behavioral health needs.”
SEE ALSO: Those Other Arkansas Travelers: More Demands, Higher Pay Part of the Road for Travel Nurses
