That’s up from about 16,000 in March, said Braynin. Job openings for travel clinicians on Aya Healthcare’s online platform topped 40,000 this week. In May, Scripps Mercy Hospital in Chula Vista hired travel nurses to expand its ICU capacity by 100 percent during a spike in South Bay COVID cases, said Mary Ellen Doyle, corporate vice president of nursing operations at Scripps Health.īut demand is so great across the country today that “we currently are using a smaller number of travel nurses than we were in May simply because we can’t hire as many as we need now,” she said. Today, this is a national situation, and we can’t recruit travelers.” “Back in the spring and summer, it was a regional situation, not a national situation,” said Chris Van Gorder, head of Scripps Health, at a news conference just before Christmas. So, the competition for travel nurses has become fierce. Now, much of the country is experiencing surging COVID cases and hospitalizations - especially California, which has 20,000 COVID patients in hospital beds and zero ICU availability in the Southern California and the San Joaquin Valley regions under state public health officials’ weighted formula for calculating capacity. Early in the pandemic, travel nurses from California and other relatively safe regions flew to hot spots such as New York, Connecticut, Arizona and Texas to take assignments. Hospitals for years have used travel nurses to fill holes in their workforces without having to hire permanent staff. “I can think of three (hospital) systems where rates are up 200 percent.” “I would say for certain specialties nothing has changed, but if you’re in ICU, telemetry or med-surg, rates could be up 80 percent to 100 percent,” he said.

Gpsy nurse