The healthcare job market is beyond fucked. I originally chose going into nursing because it’s job stability, nurses are always in demand. Turns out they’re not. The hospitals aren’t making money like they used to and they also want to limit the spread to their staff to save on other costs so they cut hours and stopped hiring back in like April. At this point they made the choice to simply exploit the natural desire to help people in the nursing staff to run understaffed with dangerous patient ratios. I’ve been unemployed since a few months before the pandemic hit and in my big suburban hospital we were always understaffed running 7:1 very frequently. It’s best practice to have a 4:1 in the kind of care I was providing but the normal was 6:1. I’ve had 8:1 once and it’s literal hell where you lie about what you did because otherwise you get written up for not doing your job despite just running nonstop all day and skipping lunch because there was only a 30 minute break in the 12 hour shifts and if you tried to take a short break the manager would say that you should clean instead. Nursing is fucking toxic and being a trans nurse makes life even worse.