Tiffanie Jones was a few tanks of gas into her drive from Tampa, Florida, to Cheyenne, Wyoming, when she found out her travel nurse contract had been canceled.
Jones, who has been a nurse for 17 years, caught up with a Facebook group for travel nurses and saw she wasn’t alone. Nurses had reported abruptly losing jobs and seeing their rates slashed as much as 50% midcontract.
“One lady packed up her whole family and was canceled during orientation,” she said.
Many career nurses like Jones turned to travel gigs during the pandemic, when hospitals crowded with covid-19 patients urgently needed the help. Some travelers — who made double, sometimes triple, what staff registered nurses earned — gathered on TikTok and other social media platforms to celebrate payday, share tips on how to calculate net income from contracts, and boast about how much they were taking home weekly. So great was their good fortune that federal and state lawmakers considered capping their pay, mobilizing nurses in protest.
The tide has swiftly turned. As covid hospitalization rates stabilize, at least for now, and federal and state covid relief funding dries up, travel nurse contracts that were plentiful and lucrative are vanishing. And after the pressure cooker of the past two-plus years led to staff turnover and a rash of early retirements, hospitals nationwide are focused on recruiting full-time nurses.
Nationally, demand for registered nurse travelers dropped by a third in the month leading up to April 10, according to data from staffing agency Aya Healthcare, although openings have rebounded slightly in recent weeks.
When Oregon’s governor declared the pandemic emergency over April 1, state-level covid relief money evaporated. Oregon Health & Science University Hospital in Portland lost funding for close to 100 travel nurs …