Harvest home
Flood gate
Corn’s history in Vermont goes back to its Indigenous peoples
Senate bill serves as weapon for religious right
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March 31, 2022
Staffing shortage creates disparity in nursing pay STAFF WRITERS
Last December, as Vermonters chopped down Christmas trees, breathed life into inflatable reindeer and placed glowing menorahs in their windows, COVID-19-related hospitalizations surged. State health officials warned that a new Omicron variant had likely been in local communities for a while, becoming the state’s most dominant strain in just one week. Hospitals, understaffed and reeling from one long shift that seems to have lasted years, began to fill again. As they reached out for help from agencies to fill holes in staffing, the cost to hire a traveling nurse skyrocketed, increasing 100 percent. The high rates were directly tied to demand, sometimes changing week to week as the need grew, said Mary Broadworth, vice president of human resources for the University of Vermont Medical Center. Nurse staffing agencies, which existed long before the pandemic, recruit nurses from across the country to fill temporary positions at health care facilities, generally positions hospitals have no other way of filling and need to staff to adequately care for patients. Agencies make money by taking a portion of the payment they secure for their nurses and charging other fees. Prices for traveling nurses have risen precipitously multiple times in the now years-long pandemic, pushing some Vermont
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hospitals millions into debt and making some wonder if nurse staffing agencies took advantage of health care facilities with no other choice by charging them exorbitant amounts and pocketing the difference. Now the state’s lone member of the U.S. House of Representatives, Democrat Peter Welch, has called for an intervention, believing that the staffing agencies providing hospitals with traveling nurses are exploitative and need reform. In late January, as the Omicron-fueled surge waned, Welch led a congressional charge for reform in the traveling nurse industry, sparking pushback at a perceived attempt to limit nurse’s pay and from staffing agencies who argue they’re hurting as much as anyone else, illuminating the tension in an industry where two employees doing the exact same work take home very different paychecks.
Welch letter On Jan. 24, Welch, along with Virginia Rep. Rep. Morgan Griffith, addressed a letter to Jeffrey Zients, the White House’s COVID-19 response team coordinator, in the wake of the Omicron surge with “concerns that certain nurse-staffing agencies are taking advantage of these difficult circumstances to increase their profits at the expense of patients and the hospitals that treat them.” The letter urged the team to enlist federal agencies with See NURSES on page 10
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Road to spring
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An early spring scene south of Charlotte.
Police staffing issue prompts regionalization discussion COREY MCDONALD STAFF WRITER
Two issues have beset Chittenden County’s two southernmost police departments in recent months: one doesn’t have any staff while the other debates if it has too much. After residents voted down
the town’s police budget at March Town Meeting, Hinesburg officials are now debating how many officers is enough for the town of 4,700. Shelburne, meanwhile, is struggling to maintain service, and is facing a staffing crisis as more than 16 of its officers and dispatchers have left in less than a year. As a result, Hinesburg has
offered to lend a hand to the Shelburne department, providing coverage and overtime detail as needed — if an officer is needed on a construction site, for example. The conflicting issues, and the recent cooperation between the two departments, is beginning to generSee POLICE on page 8