This will be brief. The news has carried many references to the upheaval in the nursing profession due to covid. “Travel Nurses” are in the spotlight. These are experienced nurses who leave their hospital jobs to work a three-month contract for higher wages somewhere else. Once staff begin leaving for these kind of arrangements, the trend accelerates. Hospital administrators have been grappling with how to respond. Here is what the University of Vermont announced just yesterday.
Seven Days is an independent newspaper in Vermont. This is what they wrote:
University of Vermont Medical Center nurses will receive 20 percent raises over the next two years under a wage agreement aimed at stabilizing the hospital's workforce.
The deal, approved Friday, will immediately bump nursing salaries 10 percent before increasing them 5 percent in October and another 5 percent a year later. The medical center will also pay $5,000 retention bonuses to unionized technical employees, excluding imaging technicians, who reached a separate deal last year.
The agreement comes two months before the Burlington hospital and its nurses’ union plan to begin negotiating the rest of their contact, which expires in July. The parties took the unusual step of hashing out wages up front because of the hospital's prolonged staffing crisis, they said at a press conference on Monday.
UVM Medical Center is Vermont’s biggest hospital, serving the biggest city of Vermont. The author of the above piece, Colin Fletcher, has written many articles to track the nursing issue, for those who wish to get a history of the nursing workforce at UVM.
Covid has caused tremendous disruption in the health care industry and nobody knows how we’ll all return to “normal” or if there will be such a thing as “normal.” In my job as a nursing faculty, man of the students tell me they are going into nursing with the specific goal of becoming a travel nurse.
Gotta go to work, can’t write more at this time.