St. Joseph’s Health will no longer hire travel nurses who live within 50 miles of Syracuse.
“We truly appreciate the sacrifices that travel staff made to help us during the pandemic. They filled many gaps in our workforce, allowing us to continue to provide safe, exceptional care to our patients,” said physician Steven Hanks, president and CEO of St. Joseph’s Health and St. Peter’s Health Partners. “It’s now time to move away from external contract labor.”
Travel rates were designed to accommodate for the fact that people were leaving their homes and families, living in hotels, and traveling to hospitals far away.
“What we’re experiencing in the post-pandemic period is that our travel staff are more likely to not be actually travelling, and instead are moving over from neighboring facilities in order to take advantage of the enhanced rates,” said Hanks. “That’s not what the rates were designed for. They were meant to be paid during the exceptional circumstances where you have no other choice but to hire labor from outside the market. Having travel staff who aren’t actually travelling work alongside our colleagues at a higher rate of pay causes resentment among co-workers and is not financially sustainable for our health system.”
A new policy has been created that restricts anyone who resides within 50 miles of the hospital where they’d be working from being hired as travel staff.