With the nurses strike now in its third week, New York City hospitals are limping along with an army of hired travel nurses, licensed RNs who take short contracts across the country for high pay in hospitals with high demand.

But even with elective surgeries postponed, staffers say that patient waiting times are increasing — and that the well-paid replacements are struggling to meet the demand. “It’s a very hard job to be a traveling nurse. But also, New York City, for a lot of people, is a very different beast,” says one social worker within the Mount Sinai system, one of the three hospital systems affected by the strike. “It’s clear when people don’t have experience in a city like New York.”

For example, the social worker says, “there are certain things that nurses in the intensive-care unit know that should be very normal for ICU nurses to know how to do. But I’ll go in to check on a patient, and there are five travel nurses at their bedside just trying to crack the code of how to do this thing.” Then there are the administrators milling about the floor, trying to be helpful but getting in the way. “At any given time, there are ten people in suits or white coats standing outside the nursing station being like, ‘Let us know how we can support,’” the social worker says. “These are people I’ve never seen before in the hospital.”

As contract negotiations between the New York State Nurses Association and the hospitals — NewYork-Presbyterian and Montefiore in addition to Mount Sinai — broke down last month, hospital executives knew their care would degrade if nurses left patients’ bedsides for the picket line without replacements. The striking nurses knew that too — and in many cases took steps to train the temporary reinforcements. “It was an uncomfortable situation, but at the end of the day, patient care is the most important and vital thing,” says Berina Selimovic, a labor-and-delivery nurse who worked the night shift at Mount Sinai Hospital’s main campus.

On one of the last nights before the strike, Selimovic was at the hospital preparing what is known as a maternity bucket: the basic kit for a new mom that includes diapers, a baby hat, and supplies for a blood draw. But a travel nurse who saw her collecting the supplies accused her of hoarding resources to “impede with patient care,” she says. Selimovic and two other nurses preparing........

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