Travel nurses' gold rush is over. Now, some are joining other nurses in leaving the profession altogether.
During Covid, travel nurses plugged gaps at understaffed hospitals across the U.S. — and tripled their pay. Now the boom's over, but there still aren't enough nurses.
Working as a travel nurse in the early days of the Covid pandemic was emotionally exhausting for Reese Brown — she was forced to leave her young daughter with her family as she moved from one gig to the next, and she watched too many of her intensive care patients die.
“It was a lot of loneliness,” Brown, 30, said. “I’m a single mom, I just wanted to have my daughter, her hugs, and see her face and not just through FaceTime.”
But the money was too good to say no. In July 2020, she had started earning $5,000 or more a week, almost triple her pre-pandemic pay. That was the year the money was so enticing that thousands of hospital staffers quit their jobs and hit the road as travel nurses as the pandemic raged.
Reese Brown on a travel nurse assignment in New Jersey in May 2020. Courtesy Reese BrownTwo years later, the gold rush is over. Brown is home in Louisiana with her daughter and turning down work. The highest paid travel gigs she’s offered are $2,200 weekly, a rate that would have thrilled her pre-pandemic. But after two "traumatic" years of tending to Covid patients, she said, it doesn’t feel worth it.
“I think it’s disgusting because we went from being praised to literally, two years later, our rates dropped,” she said. “People are still sick, and people are still dying.”
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