It's possible you've been lied to. Every single industry always says "there's a shortage" so they can justify expanding the labor pool to drive salary costs down.
Because if there us a nursing shortage there is opportunity to 'supplement' existing nurses with AI and thus transfer more wealth to the very richest among us
This doesn't make much sense to me. As the previous commenter mentioned, this shortage has been ongoing for decades, it's certainly not new in the last two years. Additionally, nursing is one of the jobs least replaceable by AI.
There's a nursing shortage because the work is brutal, under appreciated, and under compensated aside from travel nursing gigs, for those who can maintain that sort of lifestyle. Nurses are a cost center, so management is constantly running floors understaffed. It's to the point that they receive bonuses for running the floor as thin as possible, despite the worsening of patient outcomes and nurses' sanity.
Don't get me wrong, there are some good gigs for sure, but there are lots of terrible ones.
