staff growth to decelerate significantly vaccine

Traditionally, travel nurses have been employed by independent staffing agencies rather than a single hospital, although the staffing crisis has prompted at least one large academic health system to announce that it would be starting its own in-house travel nurse agency and give nurses the opportunity to travel to hospitals within its nationwide system. Travel nurses are registered nurses who work in short-term roles at hospitals, clinics, and other health care facilities around the world.

The demand for travel nursing has exploded during the pandemic. Travel nursing provides these options at a higher rate of pay. The pandemic has already cost hospitals an estimated $24 billion to mitigate the staffing shortage.ĭespite the impact of the pandemic on the nursing workforce, pre-COVID-19 factors for nurses’ dissatisfaction with hospital working conditions suggest that nurses may seek other employment options that provide them with more control over where and when they work. As such, in August 2021, 47 percent of nurse executives identified staff retention, furloughs, and layoffs as a significant challenge. Research over the past three decades has established that inadequate nurse staff in hospitals is associated with increased patient morbidity and mortality.

In a survey of more than 6,500 critical care nurses released in September 2021 by the American Association of Critical Care Nurses, 92 percent of respondents reported that that pandemic had “depleted nurses at their hospitals, and, as a result, their careers will be shorter than they intended.” Sixty-six percent said they were considering leaving the profession because of their COVID-19 experiences and 76 percent said that unvaccinated patients “threatened nurses’ physical and mental well-being.”Īddressing the shortage of nurses is no small matter. The repeated surges of COVID-19 have made the situation dire, in part due to nurse burnout and moral distress. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, health care leaders warned that hospitals face a nursing shortage.

Staff growth to decelerate significantly vaccine