Search for Nurses in California Is Feverish

By Lisa Girion

Nov. 23, 2005 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

Competition to hire nurses in California is so intense that some headhunters routinely make cold calls to nursing stations at rival hospitals, desperate for recruits.

Others are sending out direct-mail pitches that read like time-share come-ons. Mission Hospital in Mission Viejo, for example, offers nurses a $200 gift card just to come in and take a look around.

And in one extreme case, a nurse-staffing firm is using a $10-million Newport Beach mansion as a lure.

Even the recruiters are getting recruited.

“I probably get a call once a week,” said Robin Ludewig, director of nurse recruitment for UCLA . “It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there.”

Scrambling to comply with California’s first-of-its-kind law mandating 1 nurse for every 5 patients in most wards starting this year, hospitals are in a hiring frenzy reminiscent of Silicon Valley’s lust for engineers in 1999. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger this month dropped his fight to suspend the law, leaving hospitals to cope with a labor shortage that is expected to grow for decades.

“We had a shortage before the ratio,” said Sue Albert, who heads the nursing school at College of the Canyons in Valencia. Now, “it’s a free-for-all in the nursing market.”

Not all California hospitals are in the same bind. Kaiser Permanente and University of California hospitals often exceed the state staffing mandate, and their recruiters say hiring is relatively easy because nurses like the more manageable workloads.

But most hospitals are forced to use every recruiting tool they have -- and invent new ones.

One hospital staffing agency, in an extreme example of creative recruiting, has turned to reality TV. It invited six nurses from around the country to work in local hospitals for 13 weeks while living in a mansion not far from the scene of MTV’s hit reality show “Laguna Beach.”

The result is a show designed to tantalize nurses around the country with the joys of nursing in Southern California.

The show, called “13 Weeks,” follows the four women and two men as they go about their jobs and get to know one another in the leased mansion.

Access Nurses, the San Diego-based company that created the show, plans to show the episodes on the Web at www.nursetv.com beginning today and hopes to get them on television.

Each of the 13 half-hour episodes also features the nurses in their free time pursuing dramatic and daring activities, including kayaking, hot-air ballooning, skydiving and go-cart racing.

“There’s nothing that’s scandalous on the show, and yet it’s highly entertaining,” said Alan Braynin, chief executive of Access Nurses. “You see people delivering babies. You see people learning new things, pushing themselves to the limit. You see people enjoying Southern California.”

Access Nurses considered 100 audition tapes from nurses, and it didn’t have any trouble finding hospital executives willing to collaborate. Larry Anderson, president of a company that owns four Orange County hospitals, said he saw the show as an opportunity to reach a broad audience of potential recruits.

“Most hospitals offer some kind of bonus and incentive system,” said Anderson, of Costa Mesa-based Integrated Healthcare Holdings Inc. “We’ve had to get more creative.”

Among the cast is Nick Shields, a 24-year-old intensive-care nurse working at Chapman Medical Center in Orange.

“It’s been great,” the Missouri native said -- although, he had to admit, “there’s been times when you get homesick or don’t want the cameras around.”

The show highlights the lives of “travelers,” U.S.-trained nurses who bounce from hospital to hospital on 13-week contracts, following the sun, ski season and shifting staffing needs. The prevalence of travelers is one indication of the degree to which the nursing shortage has put power in the hands of employees.

“I could go to any state and any hospital, and they would want me,” said Amy Morrison, a 32-year-old labor and delivery nurse from Ohio who also is a member of the “13 Weeks” cast, working at Western Medical Center in Anaheim.

Last year, 11,000 travelers moved to California from other states, along with about 3,700 foreign-trained nurses, according to a study this year by UC San Francisco.

“There’s a limited supply of qualified RNs out there, and there’s just a huge demand,” said Evan Burks, executive vice president of Comforce Corp., a Woodbury, N.Y.-based staffing company. “As California hospitals have to meet those ratios, there is going to be a greater and greater push to bring traveling nurses from other parts of the country. It could make shortages elsewhere worse.”

Among the places California finds nurses is Des Moines. Jean Logan, a nursing professor there at Grand View College, said one of her students made a casual phone call to a San Diego hospital, which responded by flying her out for a visit.

“Other states are poaching us,” Logan said. “But we’re not giving our own nurses in Iowa the incentive to stay.”

Nurse wages in California are the highest in the nation, up 23% over the last seven years to an average of more than $33 an hour. In competitive areas, such as Orange County, nurses can earn $30 an hour right out of school.

Travelers make even more -- as much as $60 an hour, on top of housing, meals, benefits and, often, signing or completion bonuses.

This makes them an expensive quick fix, said Jan Emerson, spokeswoman for the California Hospital Assn.

The extra labor costs are adding pressure to already budget-strained hospitals, Emerson said. More than half of California hospitals lost money last year, collectively posting a record net loss of $1.54 billion.

“But because we can’t find the nurses to hire, we have no other option,” Emerson said. “That is not sustainable over the long term, which is why we want to focus on solving the underlying problem.”

The shortage is expected to worsen as nurses -- whose average age is nearing 50 -- retire in waves. Those retirements will be in full swing just as the oldest baby boomers are reaching their 70s, a milestone that is expected to put a crushing demand on hospitals. With California’s continuing population growth, the number of unfilled nursing jobs could exceed 122,000 by 2030, according to the UC San Francisco study.

And although nursing schools have succeeded in attracting students, a new problem has emerged: a nationwide shortage of nursing teachers. Today, a nurse with the experience and advanced degree necessary to teach can make two or three times as much as a hospital nurse manager.

Waiting lists at some California nursing schools are three and four years long. Schools also lack enough lecture and lab space to meet rising demand, prompting some hospitals to replace patient beds with classroom desks. Several competing hospitals in Los Angeles and Ventura counties, for example, are working with College of the Canyons and four other schools to boost enrollment by providing clinical laboratories and classrooms in vacant hospital wards.

Such efforts will take time to produce enough nurses to meet the demand. In the meantime, California hospitals continue the search for creative ways to lure nurses -- such as “13 Weeks.”

Braynin of Access Nurses believes his show will help.

“Remember what ‘L.A. Law’ did for the legal profession?” he said. “Every kid out there wanted to be a lawyer. We want to do that for nursing.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Crtitical condition

Nurse wages in California are the highest in the nation . . .

Average hourly wage for nurses in 2004

California $33.24

Maryland: $31.61

Hawaii: $30.92

Massachusetts: $30.83

New York: $29.88

. . . and the state added more nurses than any other state in the last few years . . .