Hi, my name is Lauren Hilgers and I'm a contributing writer to the New York Times magazine.

I recently wrote about the boom in travel nursing and how the profession of nursing may

never be the same again.

I first learned about the existence of travel nurses early in the pandemic in the spring

of 2020 when a friend of mine who worked as a nurse told me about some colleagues of hers

who were traveling to New York City to help in what was then the biggest outbreak in the

United States.

Travel nursing was already expanding well before the pandemic.

Staffing agencies would be called in by hospitals to help cover the gaps in their own staffing,

whether it be seasonally like for the winter flu or for the opening of a new department

or to cover a maternity leave.

In the pandemic when hospitals were overwhelmed and the working conditions in ICUs and emergency

rooms were getting worse and worse, demand for travel nurses skyrocketed and so did their

pay.

Often you would see travel nurses arriving at hospitals, making two or three times the

amount that a staff nurse would make and staff nurses were seeing these opportunities

and eventually they would leave for travel jobs themselves.

COVID nursing is really difficult.

Before the pandemic it was rare for a nurse to take on more than one patient on a ventilator

but during COVID maybe all your patients are on ventilators.

So nurses are taxing their technical abilities, they're watching countless people die and

they're setting aside their own emotions to care for the people who are really scared

...