...As the virus stampedes across the country, setting previously unimaginable infection records nearly every day of its third major surge, some hospitals are desperately searching for staffers and paying dearly for it.
There is record demand for travel nurses, who take out-of-town assignments on short-term contracts of 13 weeks or less at elevated wages. Per-diem nurses, who are willing to take a shift or two in their local hospitals, have been pressed into service. The military is chipping in.
And still, in some places, it is not nearly enough.
“This is a disaster everywhere. This is outstripping capacity in many states at the same time,” said Karen Donelan, a professor of health policy at Brandeis University who studies medical staffing. “So people are competing for labor that they used to just pass around.”
Staffing in U.S. hospitals, particularly among nurses, has reflected a patchwork of local shortages in recent years, with a ready reserve of traveling and per-diem personnel deployed in response to sudden demand — a flu outbreak here, a hurricane there, a strike elsewhere.
ut now, the once-in-a-century pandemic is exposing the liabilities of this just-in-time, cost-conscious approach at some hospitals, chronic staff shortages in others and the toll of the pandemic on an exhausted workforce.
In this fall surge of infections, supplies and equipment for patients and protective gear for health-care workers are not as scarce as they were early in the pandemic, though sporadic shortages still exist, especially in some rural areas.
But in Salt Lake City, the University of Utah Medical Center is paying traveling nurses brought in on short-term contracts “at least double” the wages it offers its staff, said Russell Vinik, the chief medical operations officer. Still, he said in an email, they “are not an effective way for us to staff.” ...
