Salary Survey: Long-term survivors: ICP wages climb with years in field
Median salary range is $50,000-$54,999
Riding a sea of change, infection control professionals are generally long-term job survivors who find their compensation climbing over time due to their wealth of experience rather than flashy annual raises, according to the annual salary survey by Hospital Infection Control.
"Overall, my job has changed so much," says Susan Kraska, RN, CIC, an ICP at Memorial Hospital of South Bend, IN, who is a 15-year veteran in the field. "It’s an entirely different world today, both on the social side of it and within the walls of the hospital." Within one recent short time period, for example, Kraska found herself talking to hospital engineers about the risk of aspergillosis during construction and dealing with a rare parasitic infection — found primarily in sheepherders — in a newly admitted patient from Serbia.
"Do I feel I am compensated for all the fires I have my fingers in?" she asks. "No way. But then, I am not sure you can put a dollar amount on any given day to what we do. Yesterday I was talking to construction engineers, and tomorrow I might be worrying about a pertussis outbreak."
ICPs such as Kraska who respond positively to the daily challenges of the job and stay in the profession for the long haul are starting to reap some benefits, the HIC survey revealed. One clear positive is that ICP salaries appear to be outstripping those of many of their nursing peers, many of whom have not been in health care as long. The median salary range for ICPs responding to our annual survey was $50,000 to $54,999. In comparative findings from a 1999 survey by the American Nurses Association (ANA), nurse practice manager and supervisor jobs were drawing $42,346, while advanced practice nurses were averaging $45,500.1 The mean annual salary for all nurses in the ANA survey was $37,980.
Longevity has its place
The higher median salary for HIC respondents may reflect years on the job. More than half of the ICPs responding to the HIC survey had been working in health care 25 years or more, and the median age of respondents was 46 to 50. The average age in the ANA survey was 41, and 32% of the respondents had been in health care less than five years. Only about 5% of HIC respondents had worked in health care six years or less. The ANA survey also found that 57% of the nurses reported an annual raise of 2% to 3%, with 22% reporting a salary increase of 4% or more.
Those findings were somewhat similar in the HIC survey, where respondents were asked about their salary increase in the last 12 months. In reply, 59% of survey respondents listed raises in the 1% to 3% range. Another 17% reported wage hikes of 4% to 6%, and a lucky 5% reported raises of 7% to 10%. According to Consumer Price Index information from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, inflation was at 3.1% from May 1999 to May 2000. Thus, in the HIC survey, only 23% of respondents’ raises exceeded the rate of inflation, reflecting a real gain in buying power over the last year. Even in a robust economy, increases in inflation discourage real gains for workers, particularly when you consider that as recently as June 1999, inflation was a paltry 1.6%.
Making a difference
"We certainly didn’t step into this arena in the first place to get rich," Kraska says. "There aren’t oodles of dollars available in health care, but sometimes appreciation and acknowledgement goes a long way. I know that what I do touches a large number of people, and when patients have good outcomes, it touches families. And I know that it touches our employees."
While such altruism resonates with job satisfaction, Kraska was not shy about negotiating for computer equipment to make her job less labor-intensive. "I [am getting] a Palm Pilot to collect my surveillance data and a program to download that into the computer so I don’t have to do all the labor-intensive work that I have been doing," she says. "It was like, hello, welcome to the new millennium. It is time for the electronic age to help infection control."
The HIC survey also reflects some downsizing of infection control departments. Though 60% of respondents reported no change in staffing, 25% said their staffs had decreased in the last 12 months. Still, the remaining 15% said they had actually been able to add employees to the infection control department.
"If I had to choose between having someone else with me or putting a nurse on the floor, I would want that nurse on the ward," Kraska says. "I figure I can do more by putting knowledge and information out to them [to help them] do the hands-on right thing."
Such choices may become more common in health care as a national nursing shortage worsens over the next few years. There is expected to be more money freed up to recruit and retain quality nurses as the shortage widens. While the majority of ICPs responding to the HIC survey are registered nurses, it is not clear whether the shortage is translating to any clear benefits yet for ICPs. But it may make the job of preventing infections even tougher. That’s because a shortage of quality nurses has been increasingly linked with adverse patient outcomes, including nosocomial infections.
"It has been consistently shown in study after study that if you do not have enough staff, bad things happen to patients," explains Marguerite Jackson, RN, PhD, CIC, FAAN, director of education, development, and research at University of California in San Diego Health Care. "Nosocomial infections consistently show up as being one of those things that happens to patients when there is not enough staff. When you really get down to what really matters, it is almost always a factor of how much time the nurse has to spend with the patient."
With such trends looming, it will be more important than ever for the ICP to get to know what direct care providers are up against, she emphasizes. "The success of an infection control program is directly dependent upon the influence of the ICP on the behavior of the direct care provider."
Underscoring that point, Jackson recommends ICPs take the time to "shadow" a staff nurse on all three work shifts. "The experience would not only be useful to the ICP, but it would give them great credibility within the staff," she says. "Many of us went into infection control in the first place because we like independence and autonomy. But in light of the current shortages, it is more important than ever to forge formal and informal alliances, even if it means giving up some independence. This does not require a change in reporting relationships but does require being at the table for important discussions. For example, when issues about the staffing shortage come up, the infection control program requirements should not be viewed as impediments. If the ICP is at the table, then he or she can be part of the solution."
Reference
1. Mee CL, Carey KW. Nursing2000 salary survey. Nursing2000 2000; 30:58-61.
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