The RV Industry Association recently noticed a distinct trend in RVing in wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Although we hear of more people choosing to work remotely, many of them out of their RV, that may not be something you expect to hear of the nursing profession.
There has long been a shortage of nurses in America; prior to COVID, there was an estimated need to fill 200,000 positions. Counterintuitively, the demand decreased during the first wave of COVID when hospitals postponed nonessential surgeries and reduced their number of beds. But more recently, as the pandemic has dragged on, demand has grown by 35 percent and is expected to continue climbing. Suspected causes include the aging of the workforce, staff burnout, low pay and declining morale.
To fill the gap, hospitals have been forced to turn to temporary travel nurses, often paying triple the hourly rate or more for a market of roving nurses that is estimated to reach 100,000 this year. According to the nurse recruitment industry (which is enjoying unprecedented capital investment), there are currently close to 40,000 open “assignments” for travel nurses around the country.
Responding to this need are travel nurses who live at home, but who contract themselves out to different area hospitals for the typical 13-week assignments. But increasingly, travel nurses are packing up and venturing much farther away in their RVs. Based on their very active social media groups (Facebook’s “Adventures in RV Travel Nursing/Healthcare” has over 23,000 members), more and more travel nurses are combining their nursing and travel passions to, as one nurse describes it, drive her “beach house, mountain cabin, and desert dwelling” to jobs all across the country.
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