Children's Hospitals Today - Spring 2022 - 18

FEATURE / STAFFING
4 | Career and market competition
Nurses have choices now that they've never had before-in
some cases, choices that were already there but look much
more attractive considering two years of a pandemic. Case in
point: travel nurse assignments, allowing nurses to take temporary
jobs where there is a high demand-at a much higher
rate of compensation, to the tune of hundreds of dollars an
hour. " There is the real competition that travel nurse assignments
are introducing that they hadn't before, " Talley says.
" We have nurses who have said, 'I'll go travel for 13 weeks and
take 13 weeks off, because I'll make more money as a travel
nurse working 13 weeks than if I work
26 weeks in my full-time job.' "
In addition to the financial benRead
more workforce
and employee wellbeing
strategies at
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workforce.
efits, there is the allure of new experiences
and travel to new places. Young,
too, has seen many nurses at Akron
Children's take on travel nurse assignments for these reasons.
" You have to be in the right family and social situation
to be able to be a travel nurse, because not everyone can pick
up and just go 13 weeks in different places...but for the nurses
who are able to do that, the financial incentives are almost
too much to overlook. "
Young says that's something her organization, and every
hospital, is struggling with across the country. " The financial
incentives for travel nursing have just escalated so rapidly
that it's a financial opportunity for people to pay off student
loans and pay off some other debt, " she says. " It's hard to judge
them for wanting to do that, but it certainly leaves us with a
gap-and then we're trying to refill some of the positions that
they vacated with travel nurses, so then our costs are going up
as well. It's a cycle. "
Korom and her team at Children's Wisconsin have had to
pull in more travel nurses lately than they ever have before to
compensate for staffing challenges. They have a creative team
working to ensure they have the right number of nurses to
meet the projected need, while remaining dedicated to investing
in the hospital's own nurses, she says.
Talley adds yet one more challenge to this mix: Many hospitals
also are increasingly offering incentives like signing bonuses,
which also attract nurses to jump to other employers, even
if temporarily. It is yet another reason to rethink and reinvent
not only how children's hospitals recruit and retain nurses-but
the very role and future of nursing. " We're looking at nurses as
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CHILDREN'S HOSPITALS TODAY Spring 2022
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Children's Hospitals Today - Spring 2022

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