USA: Nurses increasingly turning to gig work to pick up extra shifts & pay off debt
"A nurse who uses a gig app to pay off debt says it points to a problem with the profession,"
Sarah has a full-time nursing job during the day. A few evenings each week, however, she picks up shifts at other hospitals through an app called CareRev to make extra money.
Usually, the shifts are at night and within a little over an hour of her home in Wisconsin. Her husband stays home as their infant son sleeps, she told Business Insider...
Sarah is among the nurses who have turned to the gig economy over the last few years. Instead of delivering food or driving people to dates, though, the app that she uses allows her to work at nearby medical facilities. She asked that BI not publish her full name for fear of retaliation from CareRev. BI has verified her work for the app...
She estimates that her earnings through CareRev are about twice as much as they would be if she worked those shifts through a similar full-time nursing job, she said...
CareRev requires nurses with a specialty to have at least one year of experience in that area to take shifts, according to its website. That means that recent graduates with relatively little experience could use the apps, Sarah said.
"I don't think I would've went into travel nursing with one year of experience and been successful," Sarah said...
As independent contractors, nurses working on the apps also pay taxes out of their own pockets each year...
"I don't know that people take all of that into consideration when getting into this," she said of working nursing shifts through the gig apps.
CareRev did not respond to a request for comment from BI.