Overview:
Hospitals are hiring travel nurses to help address the state's nursing shortage. Is this a sustainable situation? Nurses say no.
With the first case of measles in Colorado since 2023 and bird flu being a mutation away from infecting humans, there’s no question that registered nurses are strung out. But the familiar trope of burned-out nurses doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of our shortfall of nurses. According to the Colorado Workforce Development Council’s 2023 Talent Pipeline Report, the state has a nursing shortage of over 7,000 registered nurses.
“I’m done and I’m tired,” said Elise Peterson, a former registered nurse and travel nurse. Peterson is currently an affiliate faculty member at Regis University and a pediatric nurse expert witness in legal proceedings, but she worked in intensive pediatric care for over two decades. Following COVID-19’s widespread impact, she became tired of the “sick care model”—the approach to treating diseases or illnesses after they develop.
Peterson is just one of many nurses across the United States who spoke out during the pandemic. As a result, hospitals began to hire travel nurses, who are paid more than permanent employees. This had led to a large number of registered nurses switching to travel nursing.
“I worked through COVID, and that made me pretty jaded in the healthcare world,” said Jayla Heath, a travel nurse from Phoenix who is considering Denver as her next destination. “But if you are feeling burned out as a travel nurse, it’s really easy to just go to another hospital, another state, another place.”
Now with a projected loss of 10,000 registered nurses in Colorado for 2026, the question still stands: is travel nursing a long-term solution?
Travel nurses are only required to have two years of nursing experience in a specialty and the necessary credentials for that specialty. Their assignments, at a destination of their choice, can range from eight to 26 weeks, which makes it difficult to build up the same level of institutional knowledge as permanent staff members.
“When you’re a travel nurse, you never know a lot of policies and procedures and the big missions and values of the hospitals, and you kinda don’t care,” Peterson said. “Whereas when you’re a staff nurse, you’re boots on the ground with policies and procedures.”
Beyond that, travel nurses stipulate their days off (PTO) through a contract, while staff nurses have less freedom with their schedule. The more resounding issue for most, however, is the pay gap.
“It’s not all about money, but it’s just kind of insulting; I have two master’s degrees,” Peterson said. “How am I making $20,000 less than someone who has two years of experience?”
According to a 2024 statistic, travel nurses earn $16.20 more per hour than registered nurses in Colorado. However, the pay for travel nurses at any destination in the U.S. can fluctuate depending on their necessity.
“As a travel nurse, I’ve made as little as double and as big as probably triple [more than a registered nurse],” said Sandi Gleim, a current travel nurse from Denver. “It varies based on how busy the hospital is and their willingness to pay.”
Gleim had a successful career as a pediatric nurse in Denver before transitioning to travel nursing. She changed her address to Florida to travel to Colorado, where her family lives. Despite working as a travel nurse to make ends meet, Gleim is dissatisfied with her career.
“I would just get rid of travel nursing and pay staff better,” Gleim said. “I want the money; I have three kids in college.”
Similar to economic models of hotel room rates with maids, hospitals in the 1920s shifted to a billing model where nurses were bundled into overall charges, making it impossible to bill patients for individual nursing services. This was cited as the crux of the nursing crisis in a video by ReachRN, a nurse marketing and engagement firm.
Given the disparity between registered nurses and travel nurses, an environment of hostility and tension is bound to arise. “I’ve been treated very well, but I’ve heard that other nurses face a hard time being bullied and being treated differently as a travel nurse compared to being a staff nurse,” Heath said. “I wish that staff nurses would be more welcoming to travel nurses in general.”
Peterson asked rhetorically, “When you’ve got 100 nurses and you bring in 50 travel nurses a season, what are we doing?” Peterson’s question underscores the staffing issues that underlie the healthcare system and the travel nurses temporarily filling the gap. Peterson posited an alternative.
“We had really high acuity, really sick kids, and we were sick of the travel nurses,” she said. “So, we all voted to take on these difficult assignments while the charge nurse recruited nurses from the Philippines who were finishing their training in the U.S. She hired three of them and to my knowledge, two of the three are still there today.”
Despite the criticisms of travel nursing, Peterson still reflects fondly on her travel nurse experience as a formative step in her career.
“Some people do it forever,” she said. “I still get phone calls to be a travel nurse all the time. I loved being a travel nurse, but I was living out of four suitcases, pushing 30 years old and working night shifts—I kind of wanted a house.”
According to the nurses Bucket List Community Cafe spoke to, addressing the nursing shortage requires a comprehensive approach to education, pay, working conditions and long-term retention strategies. They say the value for staff nurses should be paralleled to our value for travel nurses to foster an equitable and effective healthcare workforce that keeps registered nurses committed to their integral roles.
“Some of the newer and younger travel nurses have a lot more technology skills than we do, and we have a lot more bedside skills than they do,” Gleim said. “So I don’t see a huge difference between someone who’s 30 and me. We are all the same. We still learn every single day.”
