For healthcare professionals in the United States, the COVID-19 pandemic has meant longer shifts, more patients with life-threatening symptoms, and putting their own health on the line to treat others.
More than a year into the pandemic, Incredible Health analyzed proprietary hiring data from their platform and surveyed nurses across the U.S. to better understand the full scope of the pandemic’s impact on American nurses.
Incredible Health is a marketplace technology that works with hospitals’ in-house recruiting teams to hire permanent, specialized nurses in 20 days or less. Hospitals save at least $2M per facility per year in travel nurse, overtime, and HR costs when they partner with Incredible Health.
Incredible Health’s key findings from the COVID-19 Impact Study:
â 9% of nurses do not plan to get the vaccine at all
âDuring the pandemic, nurses were 75% more likely to decline an interview request because they preferred to remain with their current employer, compared to the months leading up to the pandemic
âDuring the pandemic, nurses who are looking for a new job are 26% more likely to consider a job change in order to earn a higher salary, compared to the months leading up to the pandemic
â34% of nurses reported a personal or family financial hardship during the pandemic
As of this study’s completion in March 2020, 73% of nurses had already received at least one dose of the vaccine. Though it’s a promising signal, this means that over a quarter of nurses remain unvaccinated.
Of nurses who have not yet received a dose, 33% say they don’t plan to get the vaccine at all, even when one becomes available to them (an issue reportedly driven, at least in part, by social media misinformation).
Vaccines are not the only way to protect nurses from the virus. In the early days of the pandemic, personal protective equipment (PPE) shortages were common across the country. Incredible Health’s survey from May 2020 showed that as little as 37% of nurses were receiving proper PPE. In early 2021 however, 80% of nurses report their facility now provides adequate PPE.
While this is a dramatic improvement, a fifth of nurses still do not have adequate protection from COVID-19. 23% of nurses say that despite greater PPE availability, they personally contracted COVID-19 at some point in the past year.
While PPE has improved, healthcare workplaces are struggling to adequately address the increased mental health needs of their nursing staff. 73% of the nurses say they’re not sufficiently supported by
their facility to deal with the added stress of battling a pandemic.
Despite this perceived limited support, nurses were 75% more likely to decline an interview request during the pandemic, because they preferred to remain with their current employer. In addition, nurses were 9% less likely to report considering a job change in order to work in a new city or neighborhood.
Yet there were still many nurses accepting new roles in 2020 on Incredible Health’s hiring platform. Why were these nurses making the change?
Incredible Health’s data suggests that finances play a major factor. Compared with the months leading up to the pandemic, nurses joining Incredible Health during the pandemic were 26% more likely to say they were considering a job change for the sake of earning a higher salary.
34% of nurses indicated they’d experienced personal or family financial hardship in the past year due to the pandemic, which may explain the focus on earning more income. Especially when 11% of nurses experienced a pay cut during the pandemic.
What can healthcare leaders do to support nurses? Leaders can care for nurses’ mental and emotional needs by listening to nurses’ concerns and provide coping resources for stress, anxiety, and burnout. Every frontline nurse should also receive education on the importance of vaccinations for themselves and their community.
For this study, Incredible Health analyzed proprietary data from over 60,000 nurse profiles as well as over 14,000 interview requests, and also surveyed over 500 registered nurses in the United States between February 4 and February 19 of 2021.
