Amidst the widespread infection, healthcare providers such as hospitals, private practices, and clinics faced significant challenges in acquiring essential resources beyond just personal protective equipment (PPE) and masks. The surge in demand for nurses and other healthcare professionals during this time led to an increased necessity for travel nurses. This unprecedented demand further resulted in remarkably high salaries for travel nurses.
Travel Nurse Salary Temporary increase
According to data from Vivian Health, travel nursing salaries reached nearly $3,500 per week by December 2020. However, the peak occurred approximately a year later, with rates soaring to nearly $4,000 per week. Between January 2020 and December 2021, the average pay for travel nurses experienced remarkable growth of over 99%. From December 2022 onwards, travel nursing salaries began to stabilize at approximately $3,100 per week.
Where did the increase in nurse pay come from?
The higher pay for nurses didn’t come out of nowhere. It didn’t magically occur out of thin air. Keep in mind that most hospitals are for-profit so they like to keep their labor costs low and maximize their revenue. Most hospitals wouldn’t have raised their pay nearly as much is they weren’t getting funding from somewhere.
Federal funding: one-way hospitals had money was through the Allocation of Provider Relief Fund.
The fund gave $178 Billion dollars to hospitals and medical facilities.
General Grants: $72.4 Billion
High infection hospitals: $20.7 Billion
Reimbursement for uninsured infected patients: $10 Billion
Phase 4 allocation: $17 Billion
Unallocated $7.1 Billion
That adds up to about $127 Billion dollars total sent to most major hospitals. According to the American Hospital Association, there were about 6,129 Major hospitals. If distributed evenly that is about $20.7 million dollars per hospital. In reality, bigger hospitals got a bigger cut and bigger hospitals are where travel nurses usually end up.
There has been an overall decrease in travel nursing pay and even an overall decrease in travel nursing contracts. What is driving this change and what is pushing the cost for nurses down?
Less Government funding
The main factor for the decrease in travel nurse pay is a decrease in government money. Hospitals aren’t going to hire more nurses if they don’t need to even though the employees do. That’s exactly why there are no nationwide ratios.
In 2023 according to Macrotrends hospitals are having some of the lowest profit margins since 2016 but are overall up from 2022.
According to government projections (US Bureau of Labor and Statistics), an estimated annual increase of over 203,000 registered nurse positions is expected to be generated between the years 2021 and 2031.
According to Indeed, states like California, Texas, New York, Florida, and Pennsylvania each have over 150,000 – 320,000 new RN positions opening each year.
There are 290,000 Registered positions posted on Indeed. According to Vivian, there are 83,000 travel nurse positions available.
There are no fewer jobs. People are always getting sick. Go to your local Walmart and you can see all the comorbidities. Nurses are needed everywhere.
Seasonal changes
Always keep in mind that nursing has multiple specialties and each specialty peaks at different parts of the year. For example in the warmer months as the season changes pediatrics gets hit harder because children start to get respiratory issues and the OR trends up because people tend to get more surgeries in the warmer months.
During the winter months, there is a peak in older people getting sick so specialties like ED and ICU tend to get busier.
Staff incentives
There has also been an increase in incentives for staff nurses. Incentives such as higher sign-on bonuses if you stay an X amount of years. There are also nits that offer pick-up bonuses of a couple of hundred dollars extra per shift.
Overall State of the Travel Nursing Market
This happens every year. I’ve been travel nursing for the last 3 years and a year before the pandemic and this was always the talk of the summer. Travel nursing is always going to give you higher pay than your staff job done in the right way. Same way you can get screwed as a staff nurse you can get skewed as a traveler if you don’t do your homework. Travel nursing is not going anywhere prices are just stabilizing from the all-time highs seen in the last few years. There is also another trend rising which is PRN nursing.
In this episode, we would like to introduce you to Raj Sundar. Raj Sundar is a full-spectrum family physician and community organizer. He hosts Healthcare for Humans, a podcast dedicated to educating others on how to care for culturally diverse communities so they can be better healers.
Questions and Topics
Can you give us a little background about yourself?
Why did you decide to start Healthcare for Humans?
Why doesn’t healthcare translate over to culture?
Often times we trim down treatment and approaches to patients into set protocols, once size fits all approach. When does that approach fail?
It almost seems like the bigger the healthcare system, the less culturally sensitive it is.
As a medical director, how can you help push healthcare in the right direction?
Blood Transfusion and Terumo Blood and Cell Technologies
In this episode, we would like to introduce you to Carly Newton & Lori Harada, who are both registered nurses working as managers at Terumo Blood & Cell Technologies. Carly uses that experience to educate Health Care Professionals on the most effective ways to prescribe Red Blood Cell Exchange. Lori leads a team of 12 Specialists who train and support their customers on the company’s medical devices. Lori is also a leader in the industry with more than 35 years of apheresis experience. We discuss blood transfusions, donations, the blood shortage, and current technology.
Questions and Topics
Can you give us a background about yourselves and how you got involved with Terumo Blood and Cell Technologies?
What is Terumo Blood and Cell Technologies?
What do they do?
What is the company goal?
Does Terumo do any R&D? What are they currently working on?
What is RBC and Plasma exchange?
What is apheresis?
Where does the blood go?
What is the full scope of components you can donate?
What patients or illnesses do the blood and its components help with?
What are some common misconceptions about donating blood, or where is the lack of education regarding donations or treatment?
Why do you think medical sales and pharmaceutical sales get a bad rep?
During the pandemic, how did things change for you?
The Together While Apart Project is a project made for nurses. Being a nurse in this pandemic is undoubtedly trying. We’ve been placed in a situation that most of us are unprepared for. No matter how good you are in your job as a nurse or anywhere in the world, the pandemic tested our strength, knowledge, skills, patience, and mental health.
As frontliners, we trudge on to battle like soldiers, fighting this invisible enemy to help protect the community and country we serve. It is why we are so grateful for the people who rallied and supported us, nurses, all the way. We thank the community for sending their help and for people like Deane Bower, artist, founder, and creator of The Together While Apart Project.
What is The Together While Apart Art Project?
The Together While Apart Project is a collaborative art project and fundraiser for the American Nurses Foundation, created in 2020 at the height of the ongoing pandemic. It features the fantastic artworks of 19 artists from across the country, representing nine states and coasts.
The painting represents Hope, Healing, and Light, the characteristics that Healthcare Professionals so beautifully epitomized in such a complex and unprecedented period. It also describes the love and support of all healthcare workers, especially nurses.
The Campaign
After its completion, the artwork traveled around the country for ten months. By June 2022, it finally found its home in the halls of The University of Virginia Medical Center, which now hangs in the lobby of their Main Hospital. It also received national recognition from the Smithsonian Institute, ChannelKindness.org, and NOAH (National Organization of Arts in Health), among many other well-known organizations.
The American Nurses Association has established a fund in the name of The Together While Apart Project as part of ANA’s Foundation and Wellness Initiative Programs to give back to all nurses. It will provide nurses throughout the country free services such as mental and physical wellness, job enrichment programs, and financial planning. The goal is to reach $20,200, where funds raised are already up to $12,000.
In light of this campaign, Cup of Nurses encourages everyone to help our fellow nurses. Let us all find a way to honor nurses and thank them for their tireless efforts in serving everyone during this pandemic here in our country and across the globe.
To learn more about this campaign and fundraising or if you would like to donate to this cause, click on the link below 👇
You can also Google the American Nurses Foundation, Inc. – Together While Apart Fundraiser for more information.
We believe that we can fight this pandemic together. So, let us help each other. Now is the best time to show our love and support to our heroes in healthcare; let us give back to our nurses!
Looking for more nursing and travel nursing information? Check out these helpful links!
There are five personality traits that we all have in common. Even though every one of us is different, ranging from our personality to our physical appearance, psychologists and psychoanalysts have been trying to predict behaviors and thought processes.
Body Types
Look at the friends around you. Do you share any personality traits with them? When you think about it, we are not entirely nonidentical. Even though drastically different from one another, humans do have many similarities. On the physical level, when it comes to body type, the majority, if not all, fit into three main body types:
Endomorph
Mesomorph
Ectomorph
Each body type has its strengths and weaknesses. In the same way, there are general body types. We all share certain personality traits, for example, agreeableness. We are all agreeable but to a certain point. Some might be very agreeable and are ready to say yes, while others are less agreeable and will need some convincing to take your side.
Background on the Top Five Personality Traits
Initially developed in 1949, the big five personality traits is a theory established by D. W. Fiske and later expanded upon by other researchers, including Norman (1967), Smith (1967), Goldberg (1981), and McCrae & Costa (1987).
It’s suggested that as early as the late 19th century, social psychologists were trying to gain a more scientific understanding of personality. However, it wasn’t until the first official study in the 1930s by Gordon Allport and Henry Odbert that personality had some scientific acknowledgment [1].
They took 18,000 words from Webster’s Dictionary to describe personality traits and found adjectives that described non-physical characteristics creating a 4500-word bank of visual behavior markers.
There was a hiatus from the late 1960s to the 1970s; the changing zeitgeist made publishing personality research difficult. In his 1968 book Personality and Assessment, Walter Mischel asserted that personality instruments could not predict behavior with a correlation of more than 0.3.
Social psychologists like Mischel argued that attitudes and behavior were not stable but varied with the situation. Indication of behavior from personality instruments claimed to be impossible.
The Paradigm of the Five Personality Traits
The paradigm shifted back to accepting the five-factor model in the early 1980s. During a 1980 symposium in Honolulu, four prominent researchers, Lewis Goldberg, Naomi Takemoto-Chock, Andrew Comrey, and John M. Digman, reviewed the available personality instruments of the day. This event was followed by widespread acceptance of the five-factor model among personality researchers during the 1980s.
By 1983, experiments had demonstrated that the predictions of personality models correlated better with real-life behavior under stressful, emotional conditions, as opposed to typical survey administration under neutral emotional conditions.
Emerging methodologies increasingly confirmed personality theories during the 1980s. Though generally failing to predict single instances of behavior. Researchers found that they could predict behavior patterns by aggregating large numbers of observations. As a result, correlations between personality and behavior increased substantially, and it was clear that “personality” did exist.
Personality and social psychologists now generally agree that personal and situational variables are needed to account for human behavior.
In 2007, Colin G. DeYoung, Lena C. Quilty, and Jordan B. Peterson concluded that the ten aspects of the Big Five might have distinct biological substrates.
The FFM-associated (five factors model of personality) test was used by Cambridge Analytica and was part of the “psychographic profiling” controversy during the 2016 US presidential election.
The Big Five Personality Traits
Although a person’s personality and behavior are hard to predict, there are specific tools that we can use that can provide insights into it. These tools help us understand others and ourselves better.
The five personality traits are broad, but they will give us a good general understanding of how people behave [2]. So, what are these traits?
1. Openness
Being open means being able to experience a general appreciation for art, adventure, unusual ideas, imagination, curiosity, emotion, and various experiences. People who are available to new experiences are often intellectually curious, sensitive to beauty, open to feelings, and willing to try new things.
These individuals are known to be creative and aware of their emotions. They are also most likely to have unconventional beliefs. And because they are open to these new things, they are often unpredictable. They also lack the focus they need sometimes and are most likely to engage in behaviors that are against the norms.
The Risk-taker Among Five Personality Traits
Very open people often pursue self-actualization by seeking out euphoric experiences. Conversely, those with low openness seek to gain fulfillment through perseverance and are characterized as pragmatic and data-driven, maybe even close-minded and dogmatic.
*Some disagreement remains about interpreting and contextualizing the openness factor as there is a lack of biological support for this particular trait. Openness has not shown a significant association with any brain regions as opposed to the other four attributes, which did when using brain imaging to detect changes in volume associated with each trait.*
Creativity also plays a big part in the openness trait; this leads to a more significant comfort zone in abstract and lateral thinking.
It includes the ability to “think outside of the box.”
Think of that person who’s always ordering the most exotic things on the menu, going to different places, and having interests you would never have thought of. That is someone who has a high openness trait.
People who are high in this trait tend to be more adventurous and creative. People low in this trait are often more traditional and may struggle with abstract thinking.
High
Very creative
Open to trying new things
Focused on tackling new challenges
Happy to think about abstract concepts
Curious
Imaginative
Unconventional
Low
Dislikes change
Does not enjoy new things
Resists new ideas
Not very imaginative
Dislikes abstract or theoretical concepts
Predictable
Prefer routine
Traditional
2. Conscientiousness
Conscientiousness tends to display self-discipline, act dutifully, and strive for achievement against measures or outside expectations. It is related to how people control, regulate, and direct their impulses.
A person with high conscientiousness is perceived to be stubborn and focused. Those who have high scores on conscientiousness are usually people who do not go without plans. They prefer a reliable method rather than spontaneous behaviors.
The Planner Among Five Personality Traits
The best example of a person with this personality trait is when someone you know likes to plan ahead of time the next time you meet. They also keep in contact and check on your wellbeing. People with this trait often want to organize their dates and events. They are also focused on you when you do meet them in person.
On the other hand, those with low conscientiousness are associated with flexibility and spontaneity but can also appear sloppy and lack reliability.
People low in conscientiousness tend to dislike structure and schedules, procrastinate on essential tasks and fail to complete tasks.
The average level of conscientiousness rises among young adults and then declines among older adults.
High
Spends time preparing
Finishes important tasks right away
Pays attention to detail
Enjoys having a set schedule
Competence
Organized
Dutifulness
Achievement striving
Self-disciplined
Deliberation
Low
Dislikes structure and schedules
Makes messes and doesn’t take care of things
Fails to return things or put them back where they belong
Procrastinates important tasks
Fails to complete necessary or assigned tasks
Incompetent
Disorganized
Careless
Indiscipline
Impulsive
3. Extraversion
Extraversion is a trait that many people will have come across in their own lives. It’s easily identifiable and widely recognizable as “someone who gets energized in the company of others.” The other traits of a person with extraversion include:
Talkativeness
Assertiveness
High levels of emotional expressiveness
All of which made them recognizable in many social interactions or settings. Have you noticed among your family members that there is always someone who is not afraid to express their feelings? They’re often loud and one who laughs the most audible among others. These people are also social butterflies and have the most friends or groups you know.
Extraversion is characterized by breadth of activities (instead of depth), surgency from external activity/situations, and energy creation from the external environment. The trait is marked by pronounced engagement with the outer world.
The Energetic Among Five Personality Traits
Extraverts enjoy interacting with people and are often perceived as full of energy. They tend to be enthusiastic, action-oriented individuals. They possess high group visibility, like talking and asserting themselves. Extraverted people may appear more dominant in social settings than introverted people in this setting.
On the other hand, introverts have lower social engagement and energy levels than extroverts. They tend to seem quiet, low-key, deliberate, and less involved in the social world. However, do not mistake their social involvement as shyness or depression. They are more independent of their social world than extroverts.
Introverts need less stimulation and more time alone than extroverts. But this does not mean that they are unfriendly or antisocial; instead, they are reserved in social situations. Generally, people are a combination of extraversion and introversion.
High
Enjoys being the center of attention
Likes to start conversations
Enjoys meeting new people
Has a wide social circle of friends and acquaintances
Finds it easy to make new friends
Feels energized when around other people
Say things before thinking about them
Sociable
Excitement-seeking
Outgoing
Low
Prefers solitude
Feels exhausted when having to socialize a lot
Finds it difficult to start conversations
Dislikes making small talk
Carefully thinks things through before speaking
Dislikes being the center of attention
Reflective
4. Agreeableness
Being agreeable or agreeableness refers to how people treat their relationships with others. Compared to extraversion, who like to pursue relationships, agreeable people focus on their interaction and orientation with others.
The agreeableness trait also reflects individual differences in general concern for social harmony. Agreeable individuals value getting along with others. They are generally considerate, kind, generous, trusting and trustworthy, helpful, and willing to compromise their interests with others. Agreeable people also have an optimistic view of human nature.
Disagreeable individuals place self-interest above getting along with others. They are generally unconcerned with others’ well-being and are less likely to extend themselves to others.
Sometimes their skepticism about others’ motives causes them to be suspicious, unfriendly, and uncooperative. Low agreeable personalities are often competitive or challenging individuals who can be argumentative or untrustworthy.
Since agreeableness is a social trait, research shows that this positively correlates with the quality of relationships with their team members. Agreeableness also positively predicts transformational leadership skills.
The Strongest Among Five Personality Traits
In a study conducted on 169 participants in leadership positions in various professions. These individuals were asked to take a personality test and have two evaluations completed by directly supervised subordinates. The results showed that leaders with high levels of agreeableness were most likely considered transformational rather than transactional.
Although the relationship was not strong, it was the strongest of the five personality traits. However, the same study showed no predictive power of leadership effectiveness as evaluated by the leader’s direct supervisor.
Conversely, agreeableness is negatively related to transactional leadership in the military. A study of Asian military units showed leaders with high agreeableness are more likely to receive a low rating for transformational leadership skills.
Agreeable people tend to find careers in areas where they can help the most. Charity workers, medicine, mental health, and even those who volunteer in soup kitchens and dedicate time to the third sector (social studies) are high in the agreeableness chart.
High
Has a great deal of interest in other people
Cares about others
Feels empathy and concern for other people
Enjoys helping and contributing to the happiness of other people
Assists others who are in need of help
Trust (forgiving)
Straightforwardness
Altruism (enjoys helping)
Compliance
Modesty
Sympathetic
Low
Takes little interest in others
Doesn’t care about how other people feel
Has little interest in other people’s problems
Insults and belittles others
Manipulates others to get what they want
Skeptical
Demanding
Stubborn
Show-off
Unsympathetic
5. Neuroticism
Neuroticism is characterized by sadness, moodiness, and emotional instability. Often mistaken for anti-social behavior, or worse, a more significant psychological issue, neuroticism is a physical and emotional response to stress and perceived threats in someone’s daily life.
Individuals who exhibit high levels of neuroticism tend to experience mood swings, anxiety, and irritability. Some individuals who share sudden changes in character from a day-to-day perspective could be highly neurotic and respond to high-stress levels in their work and personal lives.
Anxiety, which plays a large part in the makeup of neuroticism, is about an individual’s ability to cope with stress and perceived or actual risk. People who suffer from neuroticism will overthink many situations and find difficulty in relaxing even in their own space.
The Skeptic Among Five Personality Traits
These problems in emotional regulation can diminish the ability of a person scoring high on neuroticism to think, make decisions, and cope effectively with stress. Lacking contentment in one’s life achievements can correlate with high neuroticism scores and increase one’s likelihood of falling into clinical depression.
Individuals with high neuroticism also tend to experience more negative things in life. However, this also changes in response to their positive and negative life experiences.
Of course, those who rank lower on the neurotic level will exhibit a more stable and emotionally resilient attitude to stress and situations. Low neurotic sufferers also rarely feel sad or depressed, taking the time to focus on the present moment and not get involved in mental arithmetic on possible stress-inducing factors.
High
Experiences a lot of stress
Worries about many different things
Gets upset easily
Experiences dramatic shifts in mood
Feels anxious
Struggles to bounce back after stressful events
Angry hostility (irritable)
Self-consciousness (shy)
Vulnerability
Low
Emotionally stable
Deals well with stress
Rarely feels sad or depressed
Don’t worry much
Is very relaxed
Calm
Confident
Resilient
The Five Personalities Traits and Their Influence
From nature and nurture to age and maturation, the big five personality traits have been widely studied where we can see what influences their impact on a person’s behavior and character.
Personality has often been hypothesized as a question of nurture or nature. One particular study looked at 123 identical twins and 127 pairs of fraternal twins. The results suggested that the heritability for each trait is:
53% for extraversion
41% for agreeableness
44% for conscientiousness
41% for neuroticism
61% for openness
It has also been widely recognized that the older we get, the more our behavior traits will change. We become less neurotic, extraverted, and less open to new experiences as we age. However, our agreeableness and conscientiousness grow as we get older.
Five Personality Traits: Men vs women
The consensus is that men and women are more alike than what normative social science would have us believe. But as the title would suggest, there are some exceptions.
Weinsberg and DeYoung 2011 studied the big five traits and, in particular, Gender Differences in Personality across the Ten Aspects of the Big Five. They concluded that women tend to score higher on Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism than men.
Other studies have concluded that while the differences may be present, some traits are not extensively separate. Getting older will tend to align behavior traits such as agreeableness and extraversion, where both genders tend to score lower as time moves on.
To know more about Episode 97, click here 👇:
TIMESTAMPS:
00:00 Intro 00:46 Plugs 02:07 Episode Introduction 03:55 Background on the Big Five Personality Traits 10:04 Big Personality Traits: Openness 15:04 Big Personality Traits: Conscientiousness 18:01 Big Personality Traits: Extraversion 21:50 Big Personality Traits: Agreeableness 27:34 Big Personality Traits: Neuroticism 31:18 Big 5 and its Influence 36:19 How the 5 personality traits play role in gender 40:25 Wrapping up the episode
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