ACA Blog

By Rich Smith, 01-30-2017

I’ve been in this industry for 13 years, and have seen a lot of changes. When I started, it was all about who had the hospital contracts. That drove the business. We faxed profiles back then. Email was pretty much just an internal communication device. There was no Facebook. We had the Delphi Forums, but those really didn’t help anyone. Heck, there wasn’t even a Joint Commission. The company I started with was one of the first in the country to get certified.

Then came the downturn in 2008. The stock market tanked, and because of that hospitals had less money to spend on traveling nurses. They worked the heck out of their perm staff, and nurse burnout was at its highest ever.

Luckily, we came out of it. Then came the Obama administration and the Affordable Care Act. Regardless of your political views, the effects of a program like this had a profound impact on our industry.

Data from the US Census Bureau shows that the net number of non-elderly, newly insured rose dramatically from 2009 to 2015.

Couple this the retirement of the baby boomer generation. All of a sudden, the nurses that were once an asset to the hospital system became a liability. They left care side of the equation, and moved to the need care side. It hit the hospital system twice as hard.

So where do we stand in 2016, and into 2017 and beyond. Agencies can no longer take a short term approach to the industry. Growth from this point on will be measured by who has the strongest base of nurses traveling for them. The ones that have earned their trust, and can they stay true to who they are as they grow. The ones that take care of you when you are out there taking care of your patients in the hospitals.