“Texas nurse Jenna Price gets half a dozen solicitations a day from hospitals and staffing agencies that want to pay her four times her current salary to leave her job at a suburban Central Texas emergency room and take a temporary assignment in another hospital that needs nurses. ‘The money is ridiculous,’ Price said. Not to mention tempting – especially after the most traumatic year of her career on the front lines of the coronavirus pandemic” the Texas Tribune reports.
In Texas, where hospitals are struggling with historically low staffing levels while hospitalizations from the COVID-19 delta variant are skyrocketing, nurses like Price are a hot commodity. There are 23,000 more unfilled jobs in Texas for registered nurses than there are nurses seeking to fill them, according to a labor analysis by the Texas Workforce Commission. ‘There’s no pipeline of staff that we see ready to just hop in and start helping,’ said Carrie Kroll, vice president of advocacy, quality and public health at the Texas Hospital Association. Burnout is causing nurses of all specialties to leave the profession in droves – or to accept better paying nursing jobs in an increasingly competitive market, nurses and hospital officials say.