As nurses, we all hope for the day when insurance and public programs will serve as a safety net for millions who may be left with no medical coverage.
As the population grows, as the population ages and lives longer, and as the transformation of healthcare and related systems accelerates, having flexibility in staffing is more important than ever.
The growth of “freelance” nurses continues, and Momentum Health is proud to be an agency who helps place them, while helping providers ensure quality of care and a great patient experience, even when they are short staffed, or run up against holidays or community health outbreaks, or are called to respond to natural disasters and more.
In addition, increasingly sophisticated surgical techniques, new pharmaceuticals in parallel with a constantly growing interesting in integrative health, and the inability to keep up with demand for rooms and beds in hospitals and skilled nursing facilities is causing new models to emerge, models which are perfectly suited for the “freelance economy” for nurses and other healthcare professionals.
Interim staffing can make the difference between profitable and unprofitable operations of clinics, ambulatory care, traditional hospitals, medical centers, rehab facilities and more. For so many reasons, I foresee 2023 as a banner year for on-demand nurses. In a great article that ran on Health Leaders Media, written by Lena J. Weiner and based largely on an interview with Patricia Pittman, PhD, codirector of the GW Health Workforce Institute at George Washington University, the author wrote this:
“Registered nurses are … the largest story” in healthcare growth, says Pittman, who expects the number of nurses hired to increase by as many about 526,800 over the next few years. “We’re seeing an incredible spike in the hiring of nurses.”
Much of this growth will be in the areas of advanced practice nursing, licensed practical nurses, and licensed vocational nurses, said Pittman.
While we continue to both recover from the global pandemic, and while prepare to withstand the current “Triple Threat” (more strains of Covid, the ongoing emergence of the Monkey Pox virus, and the very troubling rise in Respiratory Syncytial Virus Infection, or RSV, which is pushing children’s hospitals to the brink) – having a pool of quality nurses, certified nurse assistants, visiting nurses and specialists available on-demand makes sense.
Sabrina