UPMC adds Travel Staffing program
Facing nationwide nursing shortages, UPMC announced the creation of UPMC Travel Staffing, an in-house travel staffing agency within the health care provider system, at a virtual news conference Friday.
The program is intended to alleviate some of the pressure of the nursing shortage, especially as nurses experiencing burnout and looking for different options choose to work at outside travel nursing companies. It will allow registered nurses and surgical technologists to travel within the UPMC network across Pennsylvania, Maryland and New York.
“We are always thinking about how to solve some of the pressing issues in health care,” said Holly Lorenz, UPMC's chief nurse executive. “We believe UPMC is the first health system in the nation to launch their own in-house travel staffing agency, initially for RNs and surgical technologists. It's a way for us to keep our own nurses, to recruit new nurses to UPMC and to bring back nurses who have left the system.”
The 800 nursing and surgical technician positions will be available through the program. The positions were posted on Thursday, Lorenz said, and the program plans to go live Jan. 2.
Nurses will be offered $85 an hour and surgical technicians will be offered $63 an hour, plus travel allowances of $2,880 every six weeks.
“We were really listening to the voices of the nurses at the bedside, and they are telling us they need more help,” Lorenz said. “Every strategy that we are putting together is meant to provide support at that front line.”
Re-recruiting nurses
In a statement, UPMC said the health system's goal is “to rely less on outside agency staff, and instead empower our own UPMC employees who would like to travel to UPMC hospitals across our footprint.”
John Galley, UPMC senior vice president and chief HR officer, said that UPMC has lost nurses who want to travel and are seeking higher wages to travel nursing agencies. He sees the new program as a way to reconnect with those nurses and hopes to bring them back to work for UPMC.
“Our goal is to get to 800 nurses, but it's going to take some time to get there,” Galley said. “Our initial goal is to re-recruit UPMC nurses who have left to go to these agencies, because now they can travel within UPMC and essentially have the same economic package.”
Galley said that agency rates have skyrocketed during the pandemic.
Before COVID-19, Galley said UPMC might pay an agency $85 an hour for a traveling nurse, who was probably making $50 an hour.
“Now, we're finding rates between $200 and $280 an hour,” Galley said. “We know that nurses are making more in that $85 an hour range, but the agencies are collecting more, which is more than tripling the difference between what they're paying the nurses. I think that's unfortunately taking advantage of a situation.”
Lorenz said that UPMC already has about 800 traveling nurses working in UPMC hospitals from outside agencies, and that like many other health care providers, UPMC has experienced record turnover amidst its core nursing staff.
“We're seeing turnover we've never seen before. We're not unique, and it's not unique to health care,” Lorenz said. “Our turnover has doubled from the same time last year.”
Different options
Galley said that other nurses who have gone to agencies may be interested in the program because UPMC's footprint is limited to Pennsylvania, Maryland and New York as opposed to across the whole of the country. The UPMC travel nurses' assignments will last approximately six weeks at a time.
“We aren't in the market to beat out what the external agencies are paying for,” Lorenz. “We believe that our expansive benefit package that we will have for the travel nurses is completely different from what external agencies are providing.”
Galley said UPMC's pension plan is expected to be a draw for the program.
“Our employees are getting up to 8% just in retirement benefits alone, and we've got great medical coverage and life insurance and disability,” he said. “It's a very, very robust package that we don't think the agencies can compete with.”
Lorenz said UPMC has also introduced three other new programs intended to give nurses multiple options for work: an incentivized weekend program, a program providing incentives for people who prefer to work night shifts, and the Life Stages program for employees transitioning to retirement.
