Actually it is. There’s not actually a nursing shortage if you look into the numbers, there’s just a shortage of nurses willing to get screamed at by delirious people while doing backbreaking work without backup or enough people to distribute that work among while getting paid pennies. If so many people weren’t leaving the field entirely due this issue (the chief complaint ALWAYS being under-staffing / low nurse-to-patient ratios, THEN pay), there would be plenty of nurses to go around. It always comes down to pay and ratios (which are inextricably intertwined) and everything else is fractions of percentages of the problem that get overemphasized so that the people siphoning money out of this system never have to address the elephant in the room. Don’t let them deflect you away from focusing on their greed. A bunch of nurses are also out there pushing themselves through degree mill nurse-practitioner schools to become wildly unsafe prescribers for the same reasons as those leaving entirely, which also reduces the bedside workforce.

Right now we’re just trying to keep the ANA from making it our fault for “patient abandonment” if the hospital doesn’t hire (usually extremely expensive) travel nurses to cover strikes. The way strikes work for nurses is that hospitals are essential to a community, so you have to give notice, then the hospital has to find temps to cover (again, I’m fine with this, I don’t consider them scabs, their wages alone are punishing the hospital, but this is also why they shouldn’t be capping travel salaries). The issue is they’re trying to make it so that it’s the responsibility of the nurses going on strike to find that coverage, or they get charged with abandoning the patients. They’re taking comments right now, let me find the link. Here’s the r/nursing post that person said it all better (I’ve been trying to get more hcw communities going over here but it’s slow going and feels like it’s only me sometimes.

They have badge attachments now that beep and tell your supervisor if they don’t sense a nurse washing their hands or using hand sanitizer when they enter a room. I get the idea for how this could lower infection rates in hospitals but I wonder if maybe it’s not just more humane to just hire more nurses and encourage us to take time to do things correctly instead of essentially fitting us with a shock collar that does everything but the actual shock. They’re doing shit like this and people still ask why they have to put up nets to catch people jumping off the parking garage like it’s some kind of mystery.