If you Need a Covid nurse? It will be $8000 per week
DENVER – In March, Claire Tripeny watched her dream job fall apart. She was working as an intensive care nurse at St. Anthony’s Hospital in Lakewood, Colorado, and loved it, despite the typical low pay in the area. But when Covid-19 hit, that calculus changed.
She recalls that her employers told her and her co-workers to “suck it up” as they struggled to care for six patients each and patched their protective equipment with tape until it completely collapsed. The $800 or so a week she was taking home was no longer worth it.
“I wasn’t sleeping and I had the most anxiety in my life,” Tripeny said, “I’m thinking, ‘I’m going to go where my skills are needed and I can be sure I have the protection I need.
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In April, she packed her bags for a two-month contract in New Jersey, followed by a Covid-19 hot spot, as part of what she called a “mass exodus” of nurses leaving hospital in suburban Denver to become itinerant nurses. Her new salary? About $5,200 a week and with a contract requiring proper protective equipment.
Months later, the offers – and the stakes – are even higher for nurses ready to relocate. In Sioux Falls, South Dakota, nurses can earn more than $6,200 a week. A recent advertisement for a job in Fargo, North Dakota, offered more than $8,000 a week. Some can get as much as $10,000.
At the beginning of the pandemic, hospitals were competing for ventilators, Covid-19 tests and personal protective equipment. Now sites across the country are competing for nurses. The surge in Covid-19 cases has turned hospital staffing into a kind of national bidding war, with hospitals willing to pay exorbitant salaries to get the nurses they need. This threatens to shift the supply of nurses to wealthier areas, leaving rural and urban public hospitals short-staffed as the pandemic worsens and some hospitals unable to care for critically ill patients.
“This is a huge threat,” said Angelina Salazar, CEO of the Western Healthcare Alliance, a consortium of 29 small hospitals in rural Colorado and Utah. “There’s no way rural hospitals can afford to pay this kind of salary.”
Texas, began as a visiting nurse in intensive care before the pandemic and said that eye-catching sums like these came with hidden fees, rightly paid.
“The way your soul is affected by this is nothing you can put a price on,” she said.
She recalls walking into the break room of a Bronx hospital in a well-paying job to care for Covid-19 patients in the first wave of New York City and seeing a sign on the wall indicating how the regular nurses were on strike.
“He said, you know, ‘We don’t do that. It’s not safe,” Hazard said. “And it wasn’t safe. But somebody had to do it.”
The highlight of his time there was putting a wedding ring back on a healed patient’s finger. But Hazard said she had secured many more body bags than rings on patients.
Tripeny, the traveling nurse who left Colorado, now works in Kentucky with cardiac surgery patients. When this contract ends, she says, she may return to Covid-19 care.
Previously in New Jersey, she had been marked by the times when she couldn’t give people the care they needed, not to mention the times when she would remove a deceased patient from a ventilator, watching the damage the virus can do by removing the tubes. filled with blackened blood from the lungs.
She now has to pay for mental health treatment out of her own pocket, unlike when she was on hospital staff. But as a so-called traveller, she knows that each concert will be over in a few weeks.
At the end of each week in New Jersey, she said, “I just looked at my paycheck and said, ‘Okay. That’s good. I can do it. “
