Hospital payrolls rise for St. Louis hospitals to keep travel staff to meet patient demand

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ST. LOUIS (KMOV) — For months, News 4 has tracked staffing shortages in the health care industry, asking what hospitals are doing to make sure you can always get the care you need. Now we’re learning how much money they’re spending on travel doctors and nurses to close that gap.

Statewide, Mercy’s payroll is increasing by $5 million every two weeks. This is after hiring around 950 travel staff to meet the needs of the pandemic. Keep in mind that a big factor here is that area hospitals are competing for these hires, driving up that pay scale.

“A lot of nurses are leaving, so we need them more,” registered nurse Elizabeth Ginnever said on Zoom Thursday.

She said the staffing shortage puts double the number of patients on certified nurses.

“These people are seeing four patients, and it’s difficult to care for other patients,” Ginnever said.

But not everyone gets the same pay for the heavy workload.

“I get paid $28 an hour, usually $1,400,” Ginnever explained. “Travel nurses are paid, depending on the floor and agency they pass through, between $4,000 and $6,000 a week, so they earn at least $100 an hour.”

“It’s gone down,” shared Betty Jo Rocchio, Mercy’s head nurse. “That $4,000 to $7,000 has come down as the pandemic has waned.”

Rocchio went on to say that she thinks an inside position is always a good situation. “They get benefits, 401k, daycare assistance,” Rocchio said.

These are benefits that travel nurses do not receive. Of course, their payment is considerably higher to help them acquire these benefits as well as short-term housing.

Rocchio won’t give News4 the exact figure for St. Louis campus payrolls before the pandemic. She said compensation for travel staff increased bi-weekly payrolls by $2 million – a spike with consequences.

“We had to find the money,” Rocchio explained. “The government helped us a little with labor costs, but overall we ate away at our profit margin because our patients needed care.”

But this ability to have a large pool of candidates and flexible hours is going according to plan, sort of.

Over the past decade, Rocchio said Mercy has worked to create a new workforce design, with schedule flexibility, to attract local and foreign applicants.

It’s called Mercy “Work On Demand”. It’s an app that Mercy employees can download to their phones to take extra shifts. This allows nurses to structure a more flexible weekly schedule with other life demands like family or health.

She said it’s important to meet employees where they are to ensure a work/life balance. Seeing this program in action is the only benefit of the pandemic.

“[The program] allows the nurse to choose how she works, where she works and how much she earns – the pay really determined how much she worked,” Rocchio said.

Thus, the need for travel personnel does not disappear. At least, for Mercy.

As for Ginnever, she said the threat of burnout continues to be a reality for some of the best caregivers in our region.

“You shouldn’t have four or three patients, like you should have one or two,” Ginnever said.

News 4 asked Betty Jo for Mercy’s nurse who sees a travel nurse make two or three times as much money what their options are. She said those employees would have to be out of the Mercy network for eight months to apply, however, there are other internal options to consider.

“This gap is closing. When you look at the workforce model, we try to keep that level,” Rocchio explained. “Our in-house nurses have the option of working additional shifts at time and a half or with another incentive. So our goal is to keep that roughly equal to what a travel nurse does for those shifts. We are working to balance this to take care of our workers.

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