Last year the city’s public hospital system spent $549 million on temporary nurses to plug roughly 2,000 vacancies across its facilities, a hospital executive revealed during the City Council’s Tuesday hearing on hospitals.
Dr. Mitchell Katz, CEO of NYC Health + Hospitals, disclosed the figure during the May 16 meeting of the Council’s Committee on Hospitals. His testimony comes as the New York State Nurses Association, which represents the city’s public nurses, has been pushing the city for a raise after its contract expired in March.
So far, negotiations between NYSNA, Health+Hospitals and the city’s Office of Labor Relations have centered on how to address the nurse shortage caused by nurses who left the hospital system during the COVID pandemic. During Katz’s testimony, he made clear he agreed with the nurses’ position that to address this issue they need a substantial raise.
“This isn’t good. This isn’t what we want,” he said of the spiraling costs of “traveling” or temp nurses. “We want to hire our own nurses.”
Katz maintained that the root of H+H’s understaffing problem is that the city does not pay competitive wages with the city’s private hospitals. Unlike many other municipal jobs, the city has to compete with the private market when hiring nurses.
“There are other [private] safety net hospitals where nurses can do good mission,” Katz said. “The fact that [40% of] people leave after the first year because they can get a markedly higher job, says everything you need to know, right? We don’t currently have competitive wages.”
Katz’s comments, which echo the nurses union on pay, suggest that the Office of Labor Relations under Mayor Eric Adams is the entity that is more actively pushing in negotiations.
The nurses are one sector of many types of city employees who have had union contracts expire this year. Navigating contract negotiations has forced Adams to test his campaign promise to limit workforce spending against the unions’ demands for raises that reflect their members’ sacrifices during the pandemic.
“As the emergency ends, our goal is to reduce our dependency on temporary staff, because we know it’s good for our entire health system,” a City Hall spokesperson said in a statement to amNewYork Metro. “We are in active contract negotiations with NYSNA, and anticipate that we will reach a voluntary agreement that is fair to the nurses as well as to the taxpayers.”
As the hearing made clear, the nurses have a fiscal case to make for a raise.
NYSNA has estimated that the gap between what private hospital nurses earn as new graduates and what NYC Health + Hospitals nurses earn is about $19,000 per year. If every nurse of the roughly 9,000 city nurses that NYSNA represents was to get a raise of that amount it would cost the city $171 million per year — less than half it spent on temp nurses last year.
The reason for the bloated temp costs is that travel and temp nurses get paid substantially more than permanent NYC Health + Hospitals staff. According to NYSNA, their rates can be two to three times as much. Linda DeHart, vice president of Finance for H+H, said during the hearing that on average travel nurses make $120 per hour.
At the end of his remarks on negotiations, Katz assured City Council members that the Office of Labor Relations and Budget Management understand that city nurses need a raise and are committed to reaching a deal quickly.
“I’m very hopeful that in the next few weeks we’re gonna have a resolution of this that will enable us to stop traveling nurses,” he said.
Read more: Subway Delays Caused by Frequent Emergency Brake Pulls
