Nurses Are Using This App For More Shifts

At first, Howell was attracted to the substantial and quick by-the-hour pay. Like other gig work apps, the rates health care facilities offer increase with demand. When she joined in 2021, gas prices were high, and nurses had been stepping away from their careers in droves, naming burnout and safety concerns as some of the reasons for leaving the profession. Apps like Clipboard offered nurses premium pay and the flexibility to choose the facilities they wanted to work for.

Howell wasn’t the only one interested.

Gig nursing apps have become hugely popular with both nurses and investors, as an estimated 100,000 nurses have left the profession since 2020 and demand for their labor remains high. Clipboard and ShiftKey — a similar nursing app — say tens of thousands of facilities now use their services. Clipboard has been valued at more than $1.3 billion by investors, and more recently, ShiftKey was valued at more than $2 billion.

But Howell eventually started to sour on Clipboard. The attendance policy runs on a points system. If a nurse fails to show for a shift, it deducts 85 of 100 points until workers earn them back through consistent attendance — over weeks or even months of shifts, depending on how often a person works. Once, when Howell was driving from Salinas, California, to a shift an hour away in San Jose, she missed a request from the app to confirm her attendance on the commute. By the time she showed up, another nurse had been assigned to the shift, and Howell was on the verge of temporary suspension from the app — she only had 15 points to spare. Eventually, she was restricted for a week after being late for a different shift.

She never knew what would happen until she showed up for a shift at a new facility, either. During a Clipboard shift at a long-term care facility, Howell said she was the only nurse working with about 40 patients, far more than usual. Mandated hours change based on the state and type of long-term care facility, but some experts have suggested patients receive around four hours of care per day.

Howell didn’t feel comfortable in the situation, she said, and tried to call Clipboard but couldn’t get through, so just did her best to get through the shift. “You basically just hope that nothing goes wrong,” she said.