UPMC creating in-house traveling nurse program to combat shortages across system

As hospitals grapple with soaring patient numbers and dwindling staff, UPMC is creating an in-house traveling program that will offer scheduling flexibility to nurses while also helping hospitals in its system that need it.

The health care system with facilities in Pennsylvania, New York and Maryland will draw from its massive footprint to allow registered nurses as well as surgical technologists to rotate assignments across hospitals based on need.

Tami Minnier, UPMC’s chief quality officer and senior vice president of health services, said she believes UPMC is the first health care system to implement such an in-house program.

“Over the last year, the agencies have really taken advantage of what has been going on in health care,” she said. “We’re fortunate to have the breadth and depth and size of UPMC to try and respond in new ways.”

Since the pandemic began, health systems across the country have lost nurses to agencies, which offer premium pay to travel to covid-19 hotspots and help hospitals in those areas care for the influx of sick patients.

“Our goal is to be able to keep those folks close and allow them that opportunity to make a premium dollar (and) to be able to then travel and meet the flexibility needs across the system,” Minnier said. “Whether it’s at Pinnacle or Chautauqua or Western Maryland, they will move every six weeks and they will have a new assignment.”

The value, she said, lies in the fact that they remain UPMC nurses who know the system. The hope is also that the unique in-house travel opportunity will help recruit new nurses and draw back those who might have left over the past two years for agency work.

“We hope this will be a successful strategy for them to feel the incremental return of employees to the organization and to be able to keep doing what they’ve been doing,” Minnier said.

The program comes at a time when staffing in some areas it at its lowest and capacity is at its highest, and medical experts indicate it is a matter of when, not if, the contagious omicron variant sweeps through the country.

Data released Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that the omicron variant accounted for 2.9% of covid cases across the country last week, up from 0.4% the week prior.

Covid-19 hospitalizations have increased 20% nationally over the past two weeks, according to the New York Times, and cases have been on the rise locally as well.

In Pennsylvania in the second week of December, the average daily new case count was just under 8,200. As of Friday, more than 4,600 people across the state were hospitalized with the virus, and just more than 13% were on ventilators.

Across the state just under 14% of intensive care beds remain available. That drops to 9% for pediatric ICU beds. About 10.5% of medical/surgical beds are available, along with about 17% of pediatric beds.