Nurses have been complaining about this dynamic on social media for months now, as thousands of full-time nurses complain that they're bearing the brunt of staffing shortages while not being fairly compensated. But finally it appears the Washington Post has caught on, publishing a report on soaring demand for traveling nurses. As WaPo explains, if 2020 was the year travel nursing took off, with 35% growth over the pre-pandemic year of 2019, this year has propelled it to new heights, with an additional 40% growth expected. WaPo says it got its number from an "independent" analysis of the health-care workforce in the US.

Traveling nurses are a hot issue in the pandemic health-care scene in the US. As an aging, burned-out and retiring nurse workforce saw unprecedented rates of employees retiring after the 2020 horrorshow, the return of hospital services that were shut down last year and a shortage of foreign recruits and nursing students have combined to leave hospitals desperately short staffed on the nursing front.