Robyn Morgan, Ariana Stemple, and Cori Holloway became friends working together at St. Joseph Hospital in Denver, Colorado. These friends are bonded for life after a shopping trip at Murdoch’s in Grand Junction this past September.
Morgan, leader of medical imaging at Saint Joseph Hospital in Denver, wasn’t feeling well shopping, and before she knew it, she was on the ground unconscious. Holloway and Stemple, both cardiac nurses, rushed over instinctively, performing CPR.
Daily Nurse proudly names Ariana Stemple and Cori Holloway the Nurses of the Week. Their swift reaction to Morgan’s medical emergency saved her life.
“Every minute that a patient in cardiac arrest goes without getting CPR, their chances of survival decrease by about 10% every minute. So having bystanders out in the community performing that CPR to get patients to the hospital is the only way to improve survival and outcomes,” says Jamie Hogan, chest pain coordinator at Saint Joseph Hospital.
Morgan says she wasn’t feeling well and was looking for a place to sit down. And that’s her last memory of what happened.
Morgan had no pulse, and both nurses had never performed CPR outside of the hospital, so the first time they performed CPR, it was on their friend.
That was something Morgan had long teased them about.
They jumped into action. And it paid off. CPR kept Morgan alive until EMS arrived to take her to the hospital. Both Holloway and Stemple said they were relieved they were close by when it happened so they could help.
“It’s interesting that I’ve given them a hard time for that for so long, and then the first time they do CPR is on me,” Morgan says.
After getting to the hospital, Morgan learned that she had gone into cardiac arrest and suffered a skull fracture when she fell and hit her head. The three nurses save lives every day at her work, but Morgan never expected her own life would need saving.
The actions of Stemple and Holloway forged their friendship into a permanent lifelong bond.
Nominate a Nurse of the Week! Every Wednesday, DailyNurse.com features a nurse making a difference in the lives of their patients, students, and colleagues. We encourage you to nominate a nurse who has impacted your life as the next Nurse of the Week, and we’ll feature them online and in our weekly newsletter.
Nurses and health care workers across the country are finding strength in numbers and with labor actions not seen in years.
In California, which has a strong union tradition, Kaiser Permanente management misjudged workplace tensions during the covid-19 crisis and risked a walkout of thousands when union nurses balked at signing a four-year contract that would have slashed pay for new hires. In Colorado, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Massachusetts, nurses have been embroiled in union battles over staffing and work conditions.
As deadly coronavirus cases spiked this year, daily pressures intensified on hospital floors. Some nurses retired; some became travel nurses, hired by agencies that advertised more than double, even triple, the day rates for intensive care unit, telemetry and emergency room nurses. Others gave up their jobs to avoid possibly carrying the covid virus home to their families.
“Things had gotten particularly stark for nurses,” said Rebecca Kolins Givan, an associate professor of labor studies at Rutgers University.
“They Can Make More at McDonald’s’”
It was so grim in Pittsburgh that registered nurses at West Penn Hospital, part of the Allegheny Health Network, voted this year to authorize a strike — less than a year after they unionized with SEIU Healthcare Pennsylvania. Chief among their complaints: The hospital system had balked at improving staff ratios even as it offered bonuses, up to $15,000 for some, to hire registered nurses to fill vacancies.
Kathleen Jae, a member of the bargaining team that reached a pact without a work stoppage, said nurses wanted management to work harder to retain veteran staff members: “We had to face the fact that nurses are retiring, nurses are leaving the bedside out of frustration, and, in certain instances this year, nurses had more patients than they felt comfortable taking care of.”
Allegheny Health Network said the first-ever pact with RNs at West Penn provides “competitive wages and benefits” to help it “recruit and retain talented, experienced nurses.”
Liz Soriano-Clark, a teacher-turned-nurse on the bargaining team, said the pandemic had made workers across the health sector more careful and choosier about what jobs they’ll take.
“There’s a nursing shortage and a shortage of nursing instructors, nationwide. They’ve seen aides leave. They’ve seen cleaners leave,” Soriano-Clark said. “Why is that? Because they can make more at McDonald’s and not have to clean up vomit.”
In September, the American Nurses Association alerted the Biden administration to an “unsustainable nurse staffing shortage facing our country” in a letter to the Department of Health and Human Services. The ANA said a “crisis-level human resource shortage” was evident: Mississippi had 2,000 fewer nurses than it did at the beginning of 2021. Tennessee called on its National Guard to reinforce hospital staffs. Texas was recruiting 2,500 nurses from outside the state.
Union membership among U.S. nurses has inched up over the past 15 years and held steady, at about 17%, for five years, according to unionstats.com, an academic website. But 2021, a year of union organizing and holdouts in such disparate workplaces as Starbucks cafes and John Deere tractor plants, might well be a turning point for essential workers in health care.
“If you ask nurses what they want,” said Givan, who interviewed dozens of nurses for a 2016 book on health care workers, “they want working conditions where they can provide a high level of care. They don’t want appreciation that is lip service. They don’t want marketing campaigns. They don’t want shiny new buildings.”
Still, Givan noted, the health care sector has spent handsomely to fight unions.
After years of staff retention issues at Longmont United Hospital in Colorado, nurses are awaiting the results of a vote on whether to join National Nurses United, the largest union of registered nurses in the U.S.
Stephanie Chrisley, a registered nurse in the hospital’s ICU, said nurses are regularly caring for double the number of patients considered appropriate — often three to four “ventilated, sedated, critically ill patients.”
She and others protested outside the hospital in early December. They said the company that runs the hospital, Centura Health, this year had employed aggressive union-busting tactics, including disputing a handful of votes, which dragged out the union election for about five months. In another instance, her colleague Kris Kloster said, Centura, founded by Catholic nuns, issued company-wide emails announcing raises and retention bonuses for everyone except nurses at her hospital.
“Where there should have been newly hired nurses, there were anti-union consultants roaming around the hospital,” Chrisley said. Since July, she added, the hospital has lost nearly 80 RNs, “nearly a third of our nursing staff.” Longmont United Hospital Interim CEO Kristi Olson said in a statement that the hospital “will remain open and fully operational” and that “we are committed to making sure that all voices were heard” in the union election.
Organizing can take a long time, Givan said, pointing to tense labor negotiations in Massachusetts, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. “But when there is a crisis — what we call a hot shop — you can get workers to organize quite quickly.” Nurses represented by the Massachusetts Nurses Association walked off the job March 8 in Worcester. A chance to break the bitter impasse collapsed when management, Tenet Healthcare, refused to allow some nurses to return to their original jobs. In North Carolina, registered nurses at Mission Hospital in Asheville ratified a contract with the HCA management that locked in 17% raises over three years and set up a committee to review patient care conditions.
A recent poll by Gallup, the global analytics firm, found that the share of Americans who say they approved of unions was at 68%, its highest point since 1965.
Sal Rosselli, president of the National Union of Healthcare Workers, said that in the past year “there has just been an explosion of leads,” queries from health workers exploring how to unionize.
Rosselli, whose organization represents about 15,000 health workers, said the pandemic exposed practices that had long antagonized employees. Too many hospitals scrambled for masks, gloves and gowns, he said, and front-line workers were on round-the-clock schedules and facing ghastly daily deaths. “They weren’t keeping their employees and their patients safe,” Rosselli said, “and all because these systems were focused on profit over anything else. That has been coming on for a long, long time.”
Registered nursing is among the U.S. occupations expected to experience the greatest levels of job growth in the next decade, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Employment Projections 2020-2030. Also among the fastest-growing occupations are nurse practitioners, home health care aides and assistants. Shortages of RNs and other health care workers are expected to be the most intense in the South and West.
Some of the most powerful nursing unions in the nation operate out of California, representing employees in Western states. “The nurses in California have the hours they have, the care they have, the protections they have because of the union,” said Soriano-Clark, who has worked at hospitals in California and Pennsylvania.
Ready to Picket in a Pandemic
Douglas Wong, a physician assistant, never imagined hoisting a “strike” sign outside Riverside Medical Center. But that nearly happened after a sobering breakdown in talks between Kaiser Permanente and a top nurses union at the facility, part of the KP system. Nurses, pharmacists and operations staffers are among the insurers’ 160,000-plus unionized employees, according to KP spokesperson Marc Brown.
The California-based health system giant tried to force a two-tier pay schedule that would have cut wages for new nurses by 26%. Wong and thousands of allies — many who dryly noted they had been heralded as “heroes” in the covid crisis — prepared to picket in the middle of a pandemic. Kaiser Permanente’s demands crumbled when dozens of affiliated unions threatened one-day sympathy strikes.
The tiered-pay demand and an attempt to lower wages in some markets were dropped. Staffing ratios were adjusted to ease safety concerns. Wong said that, despite the pact, the bruising negotiations “felt like a betrayal.”
“Make no mistake: This was an enormous win for labor, especially pushing back on the two-tier. At the end of the day, they pulled back. And we made huge strides toward improvement in our staffing,” said Wong, a six-year KP employee and an official with the United Nurses Associations of California/Union of Health Care Professionals.
The negotiations were a marked shift for Kaiser Permanente, which for most of three decades has relied on a labor-management partnership with its unions, emphasizing cooperative decision-making and robust discussions. Talks were held with teams, set around circular tables, hashing out concerns. KP was known for much of the past decade as a market leader in wages and quality of care, and the labor-management partnership was received by academics and labor experts as an innovative, successful approach to managing a workforce.
The health system recently hired new top executives, and, to the surprise of the unions, Kaiser Permanente used negotiations this year to offer the two-tier pay regimen, a tactic used by auto- and steel-makers during economic downturns in the 1980s. The union negotiators noted this: The health care giant’s management wanted to scale back wages after notching $6.8 billion in net revenue from 2018 to 2020.
On Thursday, workers voted to ratify a four-year contract with KP. The company declined to comment for this article. In a news release, Christian Meisner, KP’s chief human resources officer, said: “This contract reflects our deep appreciation for the extraordinary commitment and dedication of our employees” during the pandemic. “We look forward to working together with our labor partners,” he said, to “further our mission of providing high-quality, affordable care.”
The Wall Street Journal recently reported that nurses’ pay was sweetened in 2021 by thousands of dollars in raises — handed out without union wrangling — as hospitals competed for workers. Premier, a health care consultancy hired by the Journal, analyzed 60,000 registered nurses’ salaries and found that average annual pay, not including overtime or bonuses, grew about 4% in the first nine months of the year, to more than $81,000. That compares with a 2.6% rise in 2019, according to federal data.
Raises don’t necessarily mean retention.
“There always seems to be a shortage of nurses,” said professor Paul Clark, who is a former director of Penn State University’s School of Labor and Employment Relations and has studied nursing and labor organizing. “But it’s important to realize there’s not a shortage of RNs. There’s a shortage of RNs willing to work under the conditions they’ve been asked to work.”
Aya Healthcare, a national travel nurse provider, has found that the pandemic aggravated historical understaffing at hospitals, spokesperson Lisa Park said in an email. “There were over 100,000 vacancies at the start of the pandemic. And now, that number has increased to over 195,000,” Park said. Travel nurses account for fewer than 2% of the nursing workforce, she added, but “with the increase in permanent vacancies due to burnout/resignations, the demand for temporary healthcare workers has increased.”
David Zonderman, a professor of labor history at North Carolina State University, noted that nurses unions have grown more political and more outspoken — in Washington, D.C., and their home states. Nurses on the hospital floor lived through a crisis — fearing for their lives amid shortages of protective equipment — much like the trials of American workers in the mining and manufacturing industries in decades past.
“This may sound weird,” Zonderman said, “but nurses are a little like coal miners. They tend to help each other. They are watching each other’s back. They have solidarity.”
“And,” he said, “if you treat people badly long enough, they finally say, ‘I’m done.’”
Our first Nurse of the Week in 2021 is a nursing icon. On December 27—the day before her 100th birthday—AAN Living Legend Loretta C. Ford, EdD, RN, PNP, NP-C, CRNP, FAAN, FAANP was awarded the Surgeon General’s Medallion for exceptional achievement in the cause of public health and medicine.
Dr. Ford, who helped to create the first NP program at the University of Colorado in 1965, is regarded as a co-founder of the Nurse Practitioner (NP) profession. As a public health nurse in the 1940s and 1950s, she became concerned about Colorado’s underserved rural communities, and came to believe that with specialized training, nurses could help to fill the gap. Ultimately, Ford and pediatrician Henry Silver joined forces to found the University of Colorado pediatric NP program and the NP profession itself. Ford’s pathblazing role has led to numerous honors. She was the inaugural member of the Fellows of the AANP (FAANP), a special title reserved for providers that have made a lasting impact on the NP profession, and in 2003, she received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the journal Nurse Practitioner. In 2011, she was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame, which acclaimed her for having “transformed the profession of nursing and made health care more accessible to the general public.”
The Surgeon General’s Medallion
Ford’s latest award, the Surgeon General’s Medallion, is the highest honor granted to a civilian by the Public Health Service and the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps. AANP President, Sophia L. Thomas, DNP, APRN, FNP-BC, PPCNP-BC, FNAP, FAANP commented, “Dr. Ford has received this recognition for her vision and commitment to the health of our nation. Thanks to her trailblazing efforts, millions of patients have access to high-quality health care from NPs, the provider of their choice, and the profession has grown to more than 290,000 strong.”
David Hebert, JD, Chief Executive Officer of AANP, added, “As we celebrate Dr. Ford’s 100th birthday, I can’t think of a more fitting tribute to this titan of American health care. From co-creating the NP profession to advocating for patient access to NP care, she has played a profound role in strengthening health care access and choice for America’s patients.”
For more details on Ford’s life and achievements, see this article in Scrubs magazine.
In a year in which so many nurses displayed bravery, suffered hardships, and shone in countless ways, DailyNurse might easily have featured a “Nurse of the Day” instead of a Nurse of the Week.
Nurses have always gone the extra mile to communicate with patients and make them feel more comfortable and cared for, and we all know former patients who were so inspired by their nurses that they decided to enter the profession themselves. As 2020 raised the curtain on the Year of the Nurse, though, no one could have anticipated it would be a watershed year in which nurses became global icons of hope and courage.
Whether You’re a Hero, or Merely Awesome, Take a Bow…
Boston HCWs celebrate arrival of Covid-19 vaccine in December.
The public has long admired nurses, but this year, the world has watched nurses brave the pandemic to work in seemingly impossible conditions, act as stand-ins for patients’ absent families, and leave home to speed to the relief of overwhelmed hospitals all over the US.
Nonetheless, many of our 2020 Nurses of the Week (NotW) eschewed the word “hero.” If you glance at remarks from our 2020 Nurses of the Week, you might note that while they take pride in their work, few sound like they are ready to accessorize their mask with a Superman cape. Naturally, they are happy to see their work recognized, but nurses constantly go out of their way to make patients feel less frightened and alone. As frontliner Tabatha Kentner said, “This is what we do. This is why we’re here.” Nurses save lives—and when they cannot, they comfort patients in their final hours and console distraught families. It’s not an occasional phenomenon; it is an everyday occurrence. The name and photo in Wednesday’s NotW feature could easily be your own because your expertise and empathy make you a Nurse of the Week every day of the year.
On the last Wednesday of 2020, DailyNurse salutes the Nurses of the Week who made their mark during the Year of the Nurse!
Great (and Caring) Communicators
RN Emily Fawcett, Lenox Hill Hospital, NYC.
A recurring theme is nurses who use their unique talents to raise patients’ and staff members’ spirits. Some, like Marc Perreault and Lori Marie Kay, shared their musical gifts. At Lenox Hill Hospital during the height of the New York City outbreak, Emily Fawcett helped boost morale in her ICU by meeting with staff for positive-thinking “hope huddles” before starting their shifts.
Danielle Fenn applied her language skills to comfort non-English speaking Covid patients. Others, like Tabatha Kentner, have been acting as “angels” (the word angel comes from the Greek angelos, which means “messenger”) and facilitating virtual visits so patients and their loved ones can commune even in isolation (and when necessary, say their final goodbyes).
Advocates and Public Servants
RN Andrea Dalzell on Good Morning America.
2020 was a year in which nurses stepped forward, spoke up, and got involved in public and civic health. Expect to see more of this in 2021 and years to come (we hope!). Metastatic breast cancer survivor Stephanie Walker is tirelessly advocating for cancer patients and patient education in North Carolina. Another indefatigable advocate, Andrea Dalzell, is on a mission to invite wheelchair-bound people to enter the nursing profession.
NYPD’s new Special Victims Unit head Michael King is a veteran SANE—and he is determined to improve the treatment of rape victims by police and other first responders. American Academy of Nursing (AAN) “Living Legend” Mary Wakefield is sharing her public health expertise and experience in the Obama administration with the Biden-Harris transition team.
Another AAN “Living Legend,” 85-year-old Marie Manthey, is promoting frank, open dialogues between Black and White nurses, and calling upon all White allies to combat structural racism and unconscious bias.
Frontline Troopers
Anna Slayton, BSN, RN-BC
Tens of thousands of nurses this year packed their bags and took off to lend a hand in the nation’s hotspots. Reports on horrific conditions in hard-hit city hospitals were a virtual Bat-Signal for many nurses. They stashed extra masks in their suitcases, said goodbye to their loved ones, and flew to the most dangerous hotspots in the country (even nurses who had never been on a plane before!).
Texas nurse Anna Slayton, who parted from her family to spend 77 days on the New York frontlines, felt compelled to help, telling DailyNurse, “I ultimately knew it was my duty.” And in April, after flying from Tennessee to a desolate—but noisily grateful—NYC, ED nurse Kirsten Flanery declared, “I made the right decision on coming up here. I’m ready to make a difference!”
Difficult Takes a Day, Impossible Takes a Week
LPN Felicia Shaner and daughters.
Many nurses combine massive multitasking efforts with hard work to pursue their studies, and some fight to overcome dire health and financial obstacles in their quest to start a nursing career. Felicia Shaner was so drawn to the profession that she embarked on her nursing studies while living in a homeless shelter… with a toddler and a baby on board! degrees while working as hospital custodians. Rebel NurseJalil Johnson (of Show me Your Stethoscope fame) had spent his last $5 when he enrolled in an LPN program. And Brianna Fogelman had a lung transplant in her junior year of nursing school and took her nursing finals with a tube in her chest.
Is There a Nurse in the House?
Former CCN/Cardiac Care nurse Hollyanne Milley and spouse.
2020 was also a year in which nurses acted as first responders in unexpected times and places. Pamela Zeinoun saved the lives of three premature infants after the devastating August 4 explosions in Beirut. Indiana trauma nurse Colby Snyder rushed to the assistance of two people who collapsed in public within a 3-week period: the first had a seizure at her grocery store, and the second fell while Snyder was volunteering at the polls on Election Day.
Former CCN/cardiac care nurse Hollyanne Miley (whose husband is Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley) is also a good person to have at hand when out-of-the-blue seizures occur. And VA nurse Maria VanHart impressed “official” first responders by her swift, efficient, and empathic treatment of survivors at the scene of a fatal highway accident.
DailyNurse salutes all of its readers, and all nurses. If you know of someone who warrants a Nurse of the Week nod, send your suggestion to [email protected]. Best wishes for a happier, healthier, evidence-based New Year!
In March, Claire Tripeny was watching her dream job fall apart. She’d been working as an intensive care nurse at St. Anthony Hospital in Lakewood, Colorado, and loved it, despite the mediocre pay typical for the region. But when COVID-19 hit, that calculation changed.
She remembers her employers telling her and her colleagues to “suck it up” as they struggled to care for six patients each and patched their protective gear with tape until it fully fell apart. The $800 or so a week she took home no longer felt worth it.
“I was not sleeping and having the most anxiety in my life,” said Tripeny. “I’m like, ‘I’m gonna go where my skills are needed and I can be guaranteed that I have the protection I need.’”
In April, she packed her bags for a two-month contract in then-COVID hot spot New Jersey, as part of what she called a “mass exodus” of nurses leaving the suburban Denver hospital to become traveling nurses. Her new pay? About $5,200 a week, and with a contract that required adequate protective gear.
Months later, the offerings — and the stakes — are even higher for nurses willing to move. In Sioux Falls, South Dakota, nurses can make more than $6,200 a week. A recent posting for a job in Fargo, North Dakota, offered more than $8,000 a week. Some can get as much as $10,000.
Early in the pandemic, hospitals were competing for ventilators, COVID tests and personal protective equipment. Now, sites across the country are competing for nurses. The fall surge in COVID cases has turned hospital staffing into a sort of national bidding war, with hospitals willing to pay exorbitant wages to secure the nurses they need. That threatens to shift the supply of nurses toward more affluent areas, leaving rural and urban public hospitals short-staffed as the pandemic worsens, and some hospitals unable to care for critically ill patients.
“That is a huge threat,” said Angelina Salazar, CEO of the Western Healthcare Alliance, a consortium of 29 small hospitals in rural Colorado and Utah. “There’s no way rural hospitals can afford to pay that kind of salary.”
Surge Capacity
Hospitals have long relied on traveling nurses to fill gaps in staffing without committing to long-term hiring. Early in the pandemic, doctors and nurses traveled from unaffected areas to hot spots like California, Washington state and New York to help with regional surges. But now, with virtually every part of the country experiencing a surge — infecting medical professionals in the process — the competition for the finite number of available nurses is becoming more intense.
“We all thought, ‘Well, when it’s Colorado’s turn, we’ll draw on the same resources; we’ll call our surrounding states and they’ll send help,’” said Julie Lonborg, a spokesperson for the Colorado Hospital Association. “Now it’s a national outbreak. It’s not just one or two spots, as it was in the spring. It’s really significant across the country, which means everybody is looking for those resources.”
In North Dakota, Tessa Johnson said she’s getting multiple messages a day on LinkedIn from headhunters. Johnson, president of the North Dakota Nurses Association, said the pandemic appears to be hastening a brain drain of nurses there. She suspects more nurses may choose to leave or retire early after North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum told health care workers they could stay on the job even if they’ve tested positive for COVID-19.
All four of Utah’s major health care systems have seen nurses leave for traveling nurse positions, said Jordan Sorenson, a project manager for the Utah Hospital Association.
“Nurses quit, join traveling nursing companies and go work for a different hospital down the street, making two to three times the rate,” he said. “So, it’s really a kind of a rob-Peter-to-pay-Paul staffing situation.”
Hospitals not only pay the higher salaries offered to traveling nurses but also pay a commission to the traveling nurse agency, Sorenson said. Utah hospitals are trying to avoid hiring away nurses from other hospitals within the state. Hiring from a neighboring state like Colorado, though, could mean Colorado hospitals would poach from Utah.
“In the wake of the current spike in COVID hospitalizations, calling the labor market for registered nurses ‘cutthroat’ is an understatement,” said Adam Seth Litwin, an associate professor of industrial and labor relations at Cornell University. “Even if the health care sector can somehow find more beds, it cannot just go out and buy more front-line caregivers.”
Litwin said he’s glad to see the labor market rewarding essential workers — disproportionately women and people of color — with higher wages. Under normal circumstances, allowing markets to determine where people will work and for what pay is ideal.
“On the other hand, we are not operating under normal circumstances,” he said. “In the midst of a severe public health crisis, I worry that the individual incentives facing hospitals on the one side and individual RNs on the other conflict sharply with the needs of society as whole.”
Some hospitals are exploring ways to overcome staffing challenges without blowing the budget. That could include changing nurse-to-patient ratios, although that would likely affect patient care. In Utah, the hospital association has talked with the state nursing board about allowing nursing students in their final year of training to be certified early.
Growth Industry
Meanwhile business is booming for companies centered on health care staffing such as Wanderly and Krucial Staffing.
“When COVID first started and New York was an epicenter, we at Wanderly kind of looked at it and said, ‘OK, this is our time to shine,’” said David Deane, senior vice president of Wanderly, a website that allows health care professionals to compare offers from various agencies. “‘This is our time to help nurses get to these destinations as fast as possible. And help recruiters get those nurses.’”
Deane said the company has doubled its staff since the pandemic started. Demand is surging — with Rocky Mountain states appearing in up to 20 times as many job postings on the site as in January. And more people are meeting that demand.
In 2018, according to data from a national survey, about 31,000 traveling nurses worked nationwide. Now, Deane estimated, there are at least 50,000 travel nurses. Deane, who calls travel nurses “superheroes,” suspects a lot of them are postoperative nurses who were laid off when their hospitals stopped doing elective surgeries during the first lockdowns.
Competition for nurses, especially those with ICU experience, is stiff. After all, a hospital in South Dakota isn’t competing just with facilities in other states.
“We’ve sent nurses to Aruba, the Bahamas and Curacao because they’ve needed help with COVID,” said Deane. “You’re going down there, you’re making $5,000 a week and all your expenses are paid, right? Who’s not gonna say yes?”
Krucial Staffing specializes in sending health care workers to disaster locations, using military-style logistics. It filled hotels and rented dozens of buses to get nurses to hot spots in New York and Texas. CEO Brian Cleary said that, since the pandemic started, the company has grown its administrative staff from 12 to more than 200.
“Right now we’re at our highest volume we’ve been,” said Cleary, who added that over Halloween weekend alone about 1,000 nurses joined the roster of “reservists.”
With a base rate of $95 an hour, he said, some nurses working overtime end up coming away with $10,000 a week, though there are downsides, like the fact that the gig doesn’t come with health insurance and it’s an unstable, boom-and-bust market.
Hidden Costs
Amber Hazard, who lives in Texas, started as a traveling ICU nurse before the pandemic and said eye-catching sums like that come with a hidden fee, paid in sanity.
“How your soul is affected by this is nothing you can put a price on,” she said.
At a high-paying job caring for COVID patients during New York’s first wave, she remembers walking into the break room in a hospital in the Bronx and seeing a sign on the wall about how the usual staff nurses were on strike.
“It said, you know, ‘We’re not doing this. This is not safe,’” said Hazard. “And it wasn’t safe. But somebody had to do it.”
The highlight of her stint there was placing a wedding ring back on the finger of a recovered patient. But Hazard said she secured far more body bags than rings on patients.
Tripeny, the traveling nurse who left Colorado, is now working in Kentucky with heart surgery patients. When that contract wraps up, she said, she might dive back into COVID care.
Earlier, in New Jersey, she was scarred by the times she couldn’t give people the care they needed, not to mention the times she would take a deceased patient off a ventilator, staring down the damage the virus can do as she removed tubes filled with blackened blood from the lungs.
She has to pay for mental health therapy out-of-pocket now, unlike when she was on staff at a hospital. But as a so-called traveler, she knows each gig will be over in a matter of weeks.
At the end of each week in New Jersey, she said, “I would just look at my paycheck and be like, ‘OK. This is OK. I can do this.’”
Republished courtesy of Kaiser Health News.KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a nonprofit news service covering health issues. It is an editorially independent program of KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation), which is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.
Isolated from everyone but healthcare workers clad in PPE and denied the comfort of family visits, COVID-19 patients exist in a lonely world. Nurse of the Week Marc Perreault uses his musical gifts to try to bring a little intimacy and warmth into their lives. “You really do kind of get to know them and their ins and outs and their intricacies as human beings,” he said. “It [even] brings me a lot of comfort…. It really just kind of lightens the day and brings some levity to the day-to-day.”
As often as not, Marc’s voice moves his colleagues as well as their patients. One co-worker comments, “You’d walk by the room to see what’s going on, and there’s Marc singing to his patients. It just touched all of us. It was just such an amazing moment.”
Marc, who performs in a four-piece folk band, is a firm believer in the restorative power of music. He relates,”One thing that’s important for me is to share messages of hope. About a year ago, I cared for one patient who spent about a month under sedation. When she came out and transferred off the unit, she said, ‘that’s the guy who is always singing. I remembered him.'”
As with all of us, the pandemic has profoundly affected Perreault, an RN at UCHealth Memorial Hospital in Colorado Springs. While spending most of his time working in the ICU since the outbreak, he has been striving to make sense of his experiences, and hopes to find meaning in them by exercising his creativity. He says, “I’ve got like half a dozen half-written songs from all of this. The hope is that we can pull it all together in the end and make something beautiful out of something that’s kind of ugly.”
