Nurses are leaving staff jobs during COVID — and tripling their salaries as travelers

Wanderlust, and the money to fund it, made Alex Stow’s decision easy. After working a couple of years in an intensive care unit, he signed up to be a travel nurse, tripling his pay to about $95 an hour by agreeing to help short-staffed hospitals around the country for 13 weeks at a time.

“Travel” proved a bit of a misnomer. His current assignment is in Traverse City, Mich., only a few hours from his old full-time job in Lansing — close enough that he still works per-diem shifts at his previous hospital…

“Of all the things that keep CEOs of hospitals up at night, this is the key one,” said Chip Kahn, president and chief executive of the Federation of American Hospitals, which represents about 1,000 for-profit facilities.

Hospitals accuse the travel companies of price gouging. The companies say they are responding to the laws of supply and demand in an increasingly mobile work environment. Nurses’ unions say there would be no shortage if nurses were adequately paid and afforded better working conditions.