For Nurses: Feverish Demand, Healthy Bank Accounts : Careers: The profession has evolved into a seller’s market. Hospitals offer bounties to attract qualified people.

It sounds a little funny because she works in a hospital, but Eileen Glynn really likes the graveyard shift. Insomnia is not the reason, however. It’s cash. Cold, hard cash.

Desperate for nursing help and reeling from the costs of revolving-door staff turnover, the sprawling urban hospital where Glynn works has offered bonuses of $7,500 for volunteers who do a year on the 3 p.m. to 11 p.m. shift. Pulling overnight duty for 12 months brings a $10,000 windfall.

For Glynn, only 22 years old and less than a year out of nursing school, that could boost her annual salary to as much as $42,000--the kind of starting pay long associated with doctors but rarely nurses.

“I’m going to buy a condo,” she confided while doing rounds in a cardiac care unit at Rush Presbyterian-St. Lukes hospital on a recent dawn. “That’ll be part of my down payment.”

Today is “National Nurses Day” and for the country’s two million registered nurses there’s a lot more to celebrate than the pleasant but perfunctory White House recognition ceremony to be hosted by First Lady Barbara Bush.

Once a popular but low-paying and largely dead-end career for women, the nursing profession has evolved in just the last few years into a feverish seller’s market.

Never was Florence Nightingale such a hot commodity. Not only is the pay better, but nurses say they’re finally getting at least a smidgen of new-found respect from the hospital administrators and physicians who long took them for granted. To boost morale, hospitals are not only doling out money and perks but also ceding to nurses more decision-making authority when it comes to patient care while farming time-consuming paper work and bedpan chores to support personnel.

“We’re in demand anywhere in the U.S.--or the world, for that matter,” said 25-year-old Lynne Hebson, a three-year Rush veteran who figures to make about $45,000 this year under the bonus plan. “It’s a nice feeling of job security.”

Dramatic changes in demographics, economics, medical technology and blossoming career opportunities for women have converged to whipsaw hospitals between a rapidly rising demand for nursing services and a fixed supply of trained nursing help.

By the mid-1980s, this had given rise to chronic nursing shortages at hospitals and other health care facilities across the country. In 1985, the nation’s hospitals reported an average of 6.3% of their budgeted nursing positions went unfilled, according to industry figures. By last year that figure had crept up to more than 12% and hospitals in hard-hit areas like Texas were averaging vacancy rates for nursing jobs of 25%, said Laura Merker, vice president of the American Hospital Assn.’s Center for Nursing.

Any vacancy rate above 10% is considered serious enough that it could “disrupt the quality and continuity of patient care,” in the words of a staff report of the American Nurses Assn., a Kansas City-based trade group.

Though there are signs the situation might be stabilizing, industry experts predict that the shortfall of nurses still could range from 150,000 to 600,000 or more by the turn of the century.

As a result, salaries are rising by leaps and bounds, up from a 1986 national average of $27,744 for top scale to a more respectable $37,000 in 1989, according to the ANA.

The pay is even better in big cities. At facilities like Mt. Zion, Children’s and St. Luke’s Hospitals in San Francisco, a nurse with as little as six months experience will be earning $38,160 in regular salary alone beginning June 1, according to the California Nurses Assn. Veteran nurses will earn $45,000 before overtime and shift differential stipends are added on. Over in the East Bay, several hospitals have signed contracts recently that will give their nurses raises of 18% to 22% over two years.

Fatter checks are not the only means to lure job prospects. Recruiters routinely dangle enticements such as flexible scheduling, day care, bonuses, longer vacations and tuition reimbursements for graduate school. Many facilities add less orthodox wrinkles. Often it’s something as simple as free parking or better cafeteria privileges. But there are also offers of free cars, lodging, trips to Hawaii and even bounties of $1,000 and more a head for nurses who bring new colleagues on staff.

In Los Angeles, the 377-bed White Memorial Medical Center runs newspaper ads promising nurses not only a $2,000 signing bonus but also free maid service for a year. Loyola University hospital near Chicago makes free tuition available not just to nurses who want to continue their education, but also to their husbands or wives. In Arizona, billboards suggest to vacationing nurses that they’d be happier if they stayed and worked in a drier, warmer climate. Hospitals in Florida target nurse recruitment ads to northern cities in the winter.

The bonus plan at Rush, a 1,000-bed facility 2 miles west of Chicago’s Loop, may sound extreme. But at least one recently opened Dallas institution has gone one better.

To lure nurses to the new 160-bed Zale Lipshy Hospital, part of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, administrators have offered a $10,000 signing bonus to any out-of-towner who agrees to relocate to Dallas and stay for two years. Half the bonanza is payable up front. Even better, the benefits package includes three months of vacation a year.

Arianne McCord, the chief recruiter for Zale Lipshy, said the hospital’s switchboards have been flooded with inquiries from nurses around the country ever since the program was announced a few months ago and 25 new staffers have been added. “People are having to be very creative in terms of the things they offer in order to draw nurses,” she explained.

While a boon for nurses, the phenomenon is a two-edged sword for hospitals already struggling to keep a lid on soaring health care costs. And even though the aim is to build and retain staff, today’s angels of mercy sometimes get a little mercenary and hop from job to job to capitalize on ever improving deals.

“What we’re having now is a Robin Hood syndrome,” warned the AHA’s Merker. “It’s definitely a demand-driven shortage and we don’t see any signs of it stopping.”

Indeed, confident of finding work wherever they go, many nurses at hospitals in the Northeast routinely quit their jobs around Christmastime every year and head south for temporary jobs. After the spring thaw, they head back north.

Administrators blame the crisis not so much on a dwindling supply of nurses but on an explosion in demand for their services. Medical advancements mean that diseases that once would have automatically killed people no longer do. But that also means that today’s hospital patients tend to be far older and sicker and need much more attention than they did in past generations.

“There are simply more RN’s needed to take care of people who live longer,” explained Pam Towne, a spokeswoman for the Illinois Nurses Assn. “It’s not that nurses have been leaving the profession so much as that the demand for their services has increased so dramatically while the supply has not kept pace.”

Back in 1972, the average hospital required only about 50 registered nurses to care for every 100 patients, according to the ANA. Today, the recommended ratio is 96 nurses per 100 patients, a 92% increase.

Attempts to satisfy that demand upsurge, however, have run afoul of both sexual stereotypes and sweeping societal change. Nursing is still largely seen as a job for women. Only about 3% to 4% of registered nurses are men. At the same time, however, career barriers that kept women out of a wide variety of professions have been rapidly falling. Women who might once have gone into nursing by default are now setting their sights on the boardroom instead.

Nursing school enrollments dropped from 250,000 in 1983 to about 184,000 in 1987 before creeping up slightly to around 186,000 the following year, according to ANA statistics.

To counteract the trend, hospital and nursing groups have launched image campaigns designed to dispel a perception that nurses spend much of their time cleaning up human messes for little pay. “After four years of college you look for a job,” reads a public service advertisement now in many publications around the country. “After nursing school, a job’s looking for you.”

The California Nurses Assn. has even recorded a rap song which it uses to pitch the profession to high-schoolers and others thinking of entering a nursing program. A sample of the lyrics: “Your supporting life and hey that’s fly, the money’s good so give it a try . . . You can work in an office or a clinic or a home, you can be independent, you can travel to Rome.”

Some hospital officials justify big payouts for nurses by arguing that they actually could save money, not to mention headaches, in the long run.

Kathleen Andreoli, the nursing director at Rush, said she devised the hospital’s bonus plan to counteract several problems, including a staff turnover rate that had hit 20% a year. Rush spends about $20,000 in recruitment and training costs for every new nurse it hires, Andreoli estimated.

Permanently filling dozens of vacant nursing slots, she said, also will reduce the hospital’s dependence on nursing agencies to provide temporary help--a major cash drain at many institutions. On average, staff nurses at Rush are paid at rates equivalent to about $16 an hour.

The average agency nurse is paid $38 an hour at Rush. If assigned to intensive care, they get $54 an hour. In California, UCLA Medical Center spent $12 million on temporary nursing care in the last fiscal year alone, according to the CNA.

Said Andreoli: “Each morning I come in here with my tongue in my throat wondering if I have enough nurses.”

Whole new industries have grown up around panicked administrators trying to close gaps in their staff schedules. Large numbers of Filipinos and other Asian-born nurses have for years been working in California and other coastal states. But in recent years many European countries, especially Sweden, are training nurses and sending them here as an exportable commodity, the AHA’s Merker said.

Another innovation is traveling nurse programs that match a nurse’s yearning to see the country with temporary jobs hundreds or thousands of miles from home. Dozens of such privately run agencies have sprung up in recent years.

One of the largest is Boston-based TravCorps, which claims to have 1,200 nurses working at hospitals throughout the country at all times. Bruce Male, the company’s founder, said the firm makes all the travel and living arrangements for its nurses, who typically remain at the hospitals they visit for stints ranging from a month to three months.

Hawaii and San Francisco are preferred spots for many of his nurses, Male said. Many nurses, however, want a break from big-city pressures and prefer small towns, where rural hospitals are desperate for help, Male said. His favorite client: a 25-bed hospital in Muleshoe, Tex., that, until it closed two years ago, always had a pair of traveling nurses on staff.

“These nurses were an event in town,” he explained. “They used to eat in a different home every night.”