re: Nurse Shortages in Nola Metro? If There Is One, How Bad Is It?

Shortage is real and it’s due to wealthier hospitals buying up all the resources. Nurses were getting paid ridiculous amounts of money the last 2 years. Respiratory therapists are having a massive shortage too, worse than nurses. Alllll due to travel. My boss left and the only person above him was the CEO. He was over 4 departments.

Travel nurses are making 100+ an hour. Literally driving Maseratis and Ferraris at my hospital.

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That's because a big portion of the staff has either quit or been fired over the vaccine mandates

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Here’s the biggest factors. Companies who don’t enforce the vaccine mandate or COVID protocols are are fined $15,350 per violation.

So they are forcing employees to get vax’d or get fired or quit.

My sister is a nurse/director for a home health agency, she said over Thanksgiving that all nurses in Louisiana have to be vaccinated by early December or lose their license.

She said several she works with were just quitting instead

Plenty of bedside nurses are burned out and finding other nursing jobs with better hours and quality of life or, like two 20y veteran nurses I work with, they quit and are traveling making triple their previous salary.

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My sister is a nurse/director for a home health agency, she said over Thanksgiving that all nurses in Louisiana have to be vaccinated by early December or lose their license.

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No exemption plus testing option?

Of course there is a shortage, OT canceled nurses.

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My Friend just got a $92k contract for 3mo of travel nursing

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West Jeff is paying Travel Nurses over 10k for 7 straight 12 hour shifts

Before Covid, NOLA faced nursing shortages because Louisiana pays nurses significantly less than every surrounding state. Nurses instantly get a 20-30% raise simply by going across the border to Texas. As a result, the high stress/high cost of living New Orleans hospitals were always struggling to publicly recruit enough nurses (in private, they weren’t actually trying to hire them because administrators were embezzling the unpaid wages).

With covid, the pay disparities got even higher as more nurses opted to become travel nurses. Finally, the vaccine mandates made things even worse.

Back when the state was claiming that Covid patients were causing the hospitals to run out of beds, that was mostly a lie. There was never a shortage of beds, but a shortage of nurses and orderlies to service those beds. So, the calls to force nurses and staff to be vaccinated or be terminated never made any sense.