Hiring bonuses as high as $10,000 are enticing nurses back into Peoria hospitals

PEORIA – With employee compensation rising for many jobs during the worker shortage, nurses and some specialized medical personnel are being offered large hiring bonuses.

Both Peoria-area hospitals are offering hiring bonuses as high as $10,000 to RNs who commit to staying for several years. CNAs are also getting hiring bonuses, as much as $3,000. At UnityPoint Health, imaging technicians are also being offered $10,000 signing bonuses.

"Our nuclear med techs, our radiology techs and ultrasound techs, they all get those $10,000 sign-on bonuses,” said Marisa Pfoff, manager of regional talent acquisition for UnityPoint Health.

OSF HealthCare is trying to keep new job vacancies from happening by offering retention bonuses to its current employees.

“Our goal is to incentivize our own mission partners along with incentivizing new mission partners to join our organization,” said Julie Mueller, director of talent acquisition for OSF HealthCare.

OSF is also trying to entice former employees. Those who have only been gone a year can return to their old positions with their seniority intact.

“So you will accrue your vacation time and service time at that level like you didn’t leave,” said Mueller. “For all our mission partners across the organization, if you’ve left in the last year, we are reaching out to you by text and phone and email and asking you to come back and join our organization.”

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Why is there a nursing shortage?

Nurses have been in short supply for years, but the situation became dire last September when COVID cases spiked across the nation for a second time since the beginning of the pandemic.

“We had a lot of people say, ‘I’m going to retire now,’" said Shelley Nguyen, chief human resource officer for OSF HealthCare. “Retirements, work-life issues and better compensation were the top reasons why people left."

COVID vaccine mandates were not a major driver in the shortage, said OSF HealthCare Media Relations Supervisor Shelli Dankoff. Out of 24,000 employees, OSF HealthCare lost less than 1% of their total staff after making COVID vaccination mandatory.

While pandemic burnout was a very real thing, there was another factor which prompted some nurses to leave full–time jobs – the lure of higher pay. The compensation for contract travel nurses jumped to historical levels during the pandemic. Nurses could quit full-time jobs and go to work for an agency making much, much more. In some cases, they didn’t even have to travel – they could be assigned to the hospital across the street.

Travel nurses are not a new thing. They've been around a long time and are useful for filling vacancies on a temporary basis. But during the pandemic, just when hospitals needed extra help, travel nurses became extraordinarily expensive.

“Our billing rate (for travel nurses) went from $60 to $80 an hour – based on the level of expertise of the traveling RN, up to $190 to $195 an hour. So you are looking at triple the rates for an RN,” said Nguyen.

Nurses get only a percentage of the hourly rate charged to the hospital because the agency takes a cut, in some cases as high as 40%, according to a letter sent to White House officials Jan. 24 by Reps. Peter Welch (D-Vt.) and Morgan Griffith (R-Va.) representing nearly 200 members of Congress calling for an investigation into the conduct of nurse staffing agencies during the pandemic.

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Legislating change

As rates rose to a historical high, both state and federal legislators were called upon to impose tighter regulation on travel nurse agencies.

The result in Illinois is Nurse Staffing Agency Bill HB4666, which is awaiting Gov. JB Pritzker’s signature. It requires staffing agency contracts to contain a full disclosure of charges and compensation, and for 100% of the hourly rate to be paid to the nurse, among other things. Representatives from both OSF HealthCare and UnityPoint health said positive things about the bill.

“When you look at the bill, it's really about transparency of costs from traveler companies to organizations that they are contracting with, so it's really more about transparency versus saying, ‘You have to reduce your costs,’” said Nguyen. “But it’s progress. I want to be optimistic.”

Though the current legislation won’t cap what agencies can charge, hospitals have recently gotten some relief in that regard. The pay for travel nurses is market driven, and in recent weeks the demand has dropped.

"That is a national trend,” said Pfoff. “When that demand goes down, they have to lower their rates."

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A slight improvement

Though the nursing shortage is still a serious issue, there is a tiny glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel.

“We're seeing nurses who want to come back home to UnityPoint and we're welcoming them with open arms, of course, but I do still believe we're in almost a pandemic state with the nurse shortage still,” said Pfoff.

Things are improving at OSF HealthCare as well, Nguyen said.

“It’s health care, it’s always ebb and flow,” she said. “Our (available) positions are going down, our applicants are going up, we’re seeing individuals stay, our rehire rate is high. I think it’s not a quick fix. I think we are a couple years out to recover from what we’ve experienced. But for us, we are already seeing some turnaround.”

Leslie Renken can be reached at 309-370-5087 or lrenken@pjstar.com. Follow her on Facebook.com/leslie.renken.

This article originally appeared on Journal Star: Peoria hospitals entice nurses with huge signing bonuses