Maryland hospitals are suffering from being severely understaffed, and the surge of people that are coming to the hospital due to increasing Covid cases, are having people waiting hours in the emergency room.

     Due to the increase of Covid-19 cases from the holiday break and the severity of the Omicron variant, nurses are out due to being sick or overworked, and people are being infected left and right.  People are flooding in and having to wait hours for care.

      With being short staffed, several Maryland hospitals are struggling. “On any given day, 30% of the hospital’s positions may be vacant because workers left or are in quarantine,” says Nicole Beeson, senior vice president and chief nursing officer at the University of Maryland St. Joseph Medical Center in Towson.

     Governor Larry Hogan has “[plead] for people to get vaccinated and boosted and wear masks to spare the hospitals. The state opened several testing sites near hospitals so people would stop flooding emergency rooms with non-emergencies,” says the Baltimore Sun.

     People keep going to the hospitals for testing and other things that can wait for a scheduled appointment, but instead are wasting time in the emergency room when nurses can’t fix their problem and they just wasted their time and the nurses’ time. 

     “U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data show that the health care and social assistance workforce dropped significantly in Maryland during the pandemic and has not recovered,” says The Baltimore Sun. Nurses need any help they can get and staying home when you can, staying safe and not being around large groups of people would helpless people be put in the hospital and at risk.

     Nurses have to deal with their regular loads of people on top of the additional Covid patients that are arriving. And many nurses are leaving to take up travel positions. They are leaving their current position and leaving their hospital for another usually in another state. Nurses are doing this because travel nurses are getting paid more. 

      Currently travel nurses “average salary for a travel nurse is $2,020 per week in Maryland” while the average registered nurse’s” salary is $1,557 per week, according to Indeed. While it’s understandable why nurses want to become travel nurses for the increased pay, it’s leaving local hospitals suffering. 

     With the increased demand and the amount of nurses taking travel positions the hospitals are actually in such a crisis that they are now telling nurses who are Covid positive that they can still remain working even though they may very well infect patients who they are caring for. The shortage is now a very real crisis situation.