As I understand it, the idea of the nursing "shortage" is a sham right now, especially with new grads. Right? That's a pretty clear theme all over AN.
My local hospital (serves a community of maybe 40,000 people without any other hospitals within 30+ miles) has relied heavily on temporary/travel staffing. Ages ago, I processed leasing applications and leases from the staffing agencies and was privy to the details of these contracts. Ultimately, $55+ dollars per hour (and that's the lowest amount I ever saw) that the nurse worked would be paid by the hospital to the staffing company. The staffing company would pay all utilities, housing, and wages (usually $30-35 per hour) to the nurse. I believe they also received time and a half overtime pay. We had a couple of nurses stay for years, renewing their 13-week contracts over and over again.
A few years ago, before I ever paid much attention to anything dealing with nursing, I overheard that the hospital had just hired a lot of nurses from the middle east. I honestly don't have much more information about that, but I do know it was a sizable group, brought here all at one time.
Is it possible my area genuinely DOES have a shortage of nurses? Or would you guess this could be an issue of new grads still not being hired? We have probably 135+ new grads every year with RNs (roughly half are ADNs, the rest BSNs, but in all fairness, many of the BSNs move back to wherever they came from).
And if there are so many people scrambling for jobs, why are hospitals still relying so heavily on travel staffing? It is so much more expensive, unless I'm missing something.
I don't bring these thoughts to criticize travel nursing. If I didn't have school-aged kids, I'd LOVE to do travel nursing, actually. I guess I don't understand!