By Frank Long, MS, Editorial Director
Nursing salaries are having their moment. As the nation battles through the COVID-19 pandemic, nurses who are willing to travel to understaffed COVID-19 hot spots and jump into hands-on patient care are being handsomely rewarded for their work.
How Handsome?
The level of compensation is being driven by what could be called “surge pricing,” and includes factors such as nurse availability, attrition, and a city’s economic status. Taken together, those factors are driving salaries as high as $8,000 per week or more, according to an NCB News report on Nov. 24.
A nurse who could maintain an $8,000-per-week salary would collect $416,000 in a year’s time. That type of earning potential may seem attractive to nurses who don’t mind the danger of working in a COVID-19 ward—an environment that carries about the same risk as standing at the far end of a shooting range. Some, however, are willing to take the chance.
To understand the transformative power of an $8,000 weekly salary, consider that RNs who earn that rate will eclipse the average annual salaries of attorneys ($144,230), airline pilots ($146,660), and an Army four-star general ($197,302).
At $8,000 per week, nurses can afford to hire anesthesiologists ($267,020) to park their cars.
But When It’s Bad It’s Deadly
The high salary offers are having their desired effect. Staffing companies reportedly are matching well-paying COVID-19 work with traveling nurses in locations around the globe. Tropical locales such as Bermuda, for example, have opportunities to care for COVID-19 patients but the work itself is hardly sunshine and coconuts. Despite the combination of huge salaries and exotic workplaces there is plenty of cold water to be thrown on the party; some of it reported recently by the union National Nurses United (NNU).
One such report appeared in its Sept. 16 article titled Sins of Omission. In that report the union estimated at least 213 registered nurses in the United States had died from COVID-19 and related complications, while more than 1,718 of the country’s healthcare workers had died because of the same causes.
Mortality for nurses worldwide is even more grim, with at least 1,500 nurse deaths caused by COVID-19, according to an Oct. 28 report from the International Council of Nurses.
Despite the harrowing statistics for healthcare workers the “surge pricing” has created intense competition for nurses among healthcare facilities. Predictably, hospitals in high-income areas have the deep pockets to pay high salaries that keep nursing departments staffed. Underserved and rural hospitals are not positioned to afford such luxuries and, as a result, are faced with hard choices.
Hot, Hot, Hot
Demand for nurses continues to escalate and autumn weather has triggered a new wave of COVID-19 infections resulting in “hot spots” forming across the nation. Temporary or traveling nurses are the only option some facilities have had to scale up and meet the needs of their inpatient population. That need is likely to linger since widespread vaccinations will need several more months to be developed, deployed, and effectively arrest the spread of the virus.
Until then, organizations such as Krucial Staffing, Overland Park, Kan., will continue to deploy nurses to do dangerous work wherever they are needed. Always for a price.
“Right now we’re at our highest volume we’ve been,” says Krucial Staffing chief executive officer, Brian Cleary, who notes that during Halloween weekend approximately 1,000 nurses joined the company’s roster of “reservists.”
Cleary explains that with a base rate of $95 per hour, some nurses can work overtime and earn as much as $10,000 in a week — a figure that begins to approach the $610,000 annual base earnings of an NFL player.
A Hidden Cost
While the outsized earnings nurses can earn under current conditions may leave some in the profession starry-eyed there are plenty of down sides to ground them in reality. One those down sides is that traveling nurses typically pay the cost of their own healthcare insurance. That means that in some cases nurses will be saddled with the cost of a therapist or counselor to deal with the experience.
“How your soul is affected by [COVID-19 patient care] is nothing you can put a price on,” says Amber Hazard, a Texas-based nurse who has worked as a traveling ICU nurse.
The damage of emotional strain or other distress is real, according to Claire Tripeny, a nurse who did hospital-based ICU work prior to the pandemic. After the pandemic set in she spent time working as a traveling nurse in New Jersey and Kentucky. During her time in New Jersey, Tripeny sometimes was unable to provide the care a patient needed, which was difficult for her. Worse, perhaps, was pulling a deceased patient off a ventilator and removing tubes from the lungs that were filled with blackened blood.
How did she cope?
“I would just look at my paycheck and be like, ‘OK. This is OK. I can do this.”
Tripeny says she pays for her own mental health therapy out of her own pocket these days — a perk she used to receive for free as hospital staff.
