Content area
Full Text
Executive Summary
* The growth of travel nursing results from the dramatic expansion of health care demand that has occurred since the end of the recession, coupled with workforce preferences and shortages in virtually all healthcare fields.
* Healthcare organizations need to accurately determine the cost of travel nurses in comparison to the full cost of core staff to achieve greater precision in budgeting and planning for their clinical workforce.
* When full costs are included in the cost of core staff nurses, and when core staff overtime is used as the basis for comparison, the cost of travel nurses is often lower than the cost of core staff nurses in the hospital units examined in this study.
* This result contradicts the prevailing assumptions that it is more expensive to contract for travel nurses than to utilize core staff nurses.
UTILIZATION OF TRAVEL NURSES continues to grow in the healthcare industry. It is one of the fastest growing segments of temporary staffing, although all segments continue to experience expansion (Gregoire et al., 2018). The growth of travel nursing results from the dramatic expansion of healthcare demand that has occurred since the end of the recession, coupled with workforce preferences and shortages in virtually all healthcare fields. With the aging of the U.S. population and growth in overall employment, it is expected that demand for all types of nurses will continue to expand, and travel nurse utilization will remain robust.
In this environment, healthcare organizations need to be able to accurately determine cost of travel nurses in comparison to the full cost of core staff to achieve greater precision in budgeting and planning for their clinical workforce.
Building a Full-Cost Comparison
Estimates of correlated costs between travel nurses and core staff nurses often compare the bill rate for travel nurses to the pay rate for core staff nurses during regular work hours. However, such comparisons are incomplete and do not accurately reflect the true costs to healthcare organizations for employment of core staff nurses, and in fact, typically underestimate this cost.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (2018) found that employer costs, including paid leave, supplemental pay, insurance, retirement/pension, and legally required benefits, averaged 35.2% of total compensation for registered nurses working in private...