The average starting salary for a registered nurse on staff is between $28 and $32 an hour, while agency or traveling nurses that hospitals are using to fill the gaps are earning between $90 and $100 an hour, she said.Īnd as agencies fill the gaps, they are siphoning more staff nurses away with the higher pay. “It’s costing (the hospitals) a whole lot more now” to get the work done, she said. Nationally, almost 20 percent of nurses have left the profession. When COVID-19 came, things got much worse, because patient demand spiked, even as burnout shrank the nursing cohort, she said.

Hospitals dismissed concerns and said they couldn’t afford what the association wanted, Snook said, “as if we’re crying ‘wolf.'” “We’ve been talking about a nursing shortage for almost 10 years,” Snook said, citing a 2010 report by the Institute of Medicine that identified the problem. It’s not easy because hospitals failed for a long time to heed warnings about the need to increase the nursing supply and because lawmakers, influenced by hospitals, didn’t pass legislation to set staffing formulas that would have forced them to hire more nurses, said Betsy Snook, CEO of the Pennsylvania State Nurses Association, in phone interview Friday. “(To) make sure the stories you hear won’t happen again.” Teams at UPMC Altoona “work each and every day to find new solutions and invigorate current solutions,” Yealy said. It has also monitored wait times and done what it can to prioritize patients, while keeping others safe and while promoting alternative “platforms” for unscheduled care, like urgent care, telemedicine and UPMC’s contingent of primary care doctors, according to Yealy. “Of course there are longer waits now, given all those dynamics,” Yealy said.ĭespite the struggle, UPMC has kept the ER open, Yealy said.

Er nurse salary