Matching the right staffing model to the right gap, before it becomes an expensive guess
Most staffing plans aren’t built. They’re inherited. Generally, a healthcare facility ends up with whatever combination of travel contracts, per diem shifts, and float pool coverage accumulated over the last few budget cycles, patched together one open shift at a time. Nobody sat down and asked whether that mix actually matches the kind of gaps the facility tends to have. It just grew that way. But it doesn’t have to stay that way.
That gap between “what we have” and “what we actually need” is expensive. According to the 2026 NSI National Health Care Retention & RN Staffing Report, the national RN turnover rate climbed to 17.6% in 2025, and each percentage point of turnover costs the average hospital roughly $289,000 a year.
Hospitals are also losing close to $5.19 million annually to RN churn overall. None of that accounts for the slower, quieter cost of leaning on the wrong staffing model for the job: paying premium rates for flexibility a facility doesn’t need or settling for a quick fix where it needed depth.
What’s the Job, Really?
Most facilities default to whichever staffing category is easiest to request, not necessarily the one that fits the actual need. That mismatch is where costs and burnout both creep in.
Travel nurses make sense for defined, longer assignments: a maternity leave to cover, a new unit ramping up, a seasonal census spike that lasts months instead of days. They bring specialized experience from multiple care settings, but they also come at a premium. Recent industry data puts the average annual cost of a travel nurse at roughly $189,758, compared to about $123,676 for an employed RN, a gap of more than $66,000 per role. That’s not a reason to avoid travel staff; it’s a reason to use them deliberately for the assignments where their flexibility actually earns that premium.
Per diem nurses are built for the unpredictable: a sudden call-out, a one-off surge, a holiday weekend nobody wants to staff. They’re fast, but they’re also a patch, useful in the moment, less useful as a long-term coverage strategy because there’s no continuity from one shift to the next.
Local pool/internal float staff offer something travel and per diem can’t: familiarity. They know the EMR, the unit culture, the physicians’ preferences. The tradeoff is depth. A local pool is only as strong as the relationships and pipeline behind it, which takes time and infrastructure to build.
The facilities that handle staffing well aren’t the ones that pick one of these and stick with it. They’re the ones that know which lever to pull, and when, and have a partner who can pull more than one lever at once.
A Blend, Not a Bet
A maternity unit covering a 12-week leave doesn’t need the same solution as an ED absorbing a flu-season surge, and a rural clinic filling a hard-to-recruit specialty doesn’t need what either of those needs. Treating every gap the same way, usually by reaching for whichever staffing type is fastest to request, is how facilities end up overpaying for short-term fixes or understaffing for predictable ones.
The better approach starts with diagnosing the gap before staffing it: Is this temporary or structural? Predictable or sudden? A skills gap or a headcount gap? From there, the mix of travel, per diem, and local pool resources can flex to match, and that mix should be able to shift again as the situation changes.
This is the kind of work Tallavera was built around. As a medical staffing partner that works across travel, per diem, and internal agency models, Tallavera helps facilities figure out which combination actually solves the problem in front of them, instead of defaulting to whatever’s fastest to book. One client put it simply: “We could not have been more pleased with the execution and overall savings.” That’s the goal, not just filling a shift, but filling it in a way that doesn’t create a bigger bill or a bigger gap down the road.
Tallavera’s recruiting team is staffed in part by people who’ve worked the floor themselves, RNs and clinical leaders who understand that a “good match” means more than a credential check. It means a nurse who fits the unit’s pace and culture, whether they’re there for three shifts or three months. That clinical fluency is also why one nurse who came through Tallavera described the agency as “more than a talent agency, they’re mission driven.”
Building a Plan, Not a Patch
If your facility is patching holes shift by shift, it might be time to build a coverage strategy instead of another one-off request. That’s the conversation Tallavera has with partners every day, not “how fast can you fill this,” but “what will actually hold.”