HAGÅTÑA (The Guam Daily Post) — The nurse shortage at the Guam Memorial Hospital is costing a pretty penny, one that the hospital’s board of trustees is hopeful will be reduced with the recent nurse pay increase and a group of nurses about to enter the workforce.
As of January, the hospital has expended $1.13 million above what was expected to be spent.
“Mostly in contractual services. We did not expect to use as much travel nurses this year as we anticipated, so that cost has gone up,” Yuka Hechanova, the hospital’s chief finance officer, said.
Not only is the hospital paying more to augment the shortage with the use of travel nurses, recent pay increases have also weighed heavily.
“We did raise the rates for some of the physicians. Also, by the divisions, it also clearly shows where we have the negative, unfavorable differences in medical services. That’s for the physicians’ pay, and they’re saying it’s for the nurses,” Hechanova reported to the board.
Given the new rate of nurses’ pay, trustee Dr. Teresa Damian Borja suggested that they monitor the impact of the increased pay on recruitment.
“Seeing how many we can get with the new rate GMH would offer and then we could do a report card of how we are decreasing the use of travel nurses,” Borja said.
She asked the nursing department how soon new nurses straight out of college could be onboarded.
Although no timeline was given, Assistant Administrator Christine Tuquero said that a decline in the use of travel nurses has been seen.
“We’ve actually already seen a decline in rate as far as the rate goes over the years. So this is the lowest we have had our rate. We are at 100, which is still expensive, and we still would like to decrease our reliance. As far as volume, we went as low as 26 travel nurses,” Tuquero said.
The issue is maintaining services despite the nurse shortage.
“However, due to the loss of other nurses and because we’ve had to maintain our services in most areas, today we have 38. It crept up to 42 at one point, but we’re trying to maintain this number so long as we can stay staffed locally. Hopefully, with the pay adjustments and upcoming graduates from (University of Guam) and (Guam Community College), we are able to recruit more,” Tuquero said.
This upcoming university graduation, the hospital expects at least 32 graduates.
“So we have a bigger pool. And yes, we are trying very hard to reduce our reliance on travel nurses,” Tuquero said.
On that same note, she shared that nurses are going through specialty training.
“Through the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses in our specialty areas such as ICU, PICU NICU, and PCU. To boost the skills of our nurses and to give them the confidence they need and also as a retention effort,” she said.
Tuquero is hopeful that the culmination of their efforts will ultimately reduce the need for high-priced travel nurses.
“We are hoping that we can recruit more, that we are more competitive with other health care organizations and we hope we are competitive enough to recruit even beyond Guam because our travel nurses love it here and some of them would consider being hired locally if the wages were a bit more competitive,” she concluded.
Medical personnel enter Guam Memorial Hospital on Monday, July 10, 2023, in Tamuning.
