Nurse Elisa Gilbert checks on a patient in the acute care covid-19 unit at the Harborview Medical Center on January 21, 2022 in Seattle, Washington.
Photo: Karen Ducey (Getty Images)
The hospital industry is lobbying the White House to help drive down wages for health care workers across the U.S. after many travel nurses saw a rise in wages during the covid-19 pandemic, according to a new report from the Wall Street Journal. And despite a critical shortage of nurses in the U.S., hospitals are doing everything they can to make sure they earn less money.
Travel nurses, which are used to temporarily supplement existing staff during times of crisis, have seen their wages rise from about $1,706 in December 2019 to $3,290 a week in December 2021, according to the WSJ and Vivan Health.
What can the U.S. government do to stop wages from rising? Hospitals argue that wages for travel nurses have gone up due to an influx of federal money from covid-19 relief funds and FEMA grants for natural disasters. But staffing agencies that connect nurses with hospital systems across the country argue that it’s simply a matter of supply and demand.
A study of nurses by the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses in late 2021 found that 66% were thinking about leaving the health care industry since the pandemic started due to their poor experiences. And a whopping 92% said the pandemic had depleted nurses and will make them leave their jobs much sooner than they planned.
Health care workers have been inundated with extreme conditions since the start of the pandemic in early 2020. Nurses have been surrounded by death, with over 908,000 Americans dying of the disease since early 2020. And even when people with covid-19 survive, they can struggle with long term illness that must also be managed—often with the help of nurses, of course.
To make matters worse, nurses have been forced to improvise on resources (who can forget the garbage bags nurses had to …….
Source: https://gizmodo.com/hospitals-complain-nurses-making-too-much-money-during-1848505160