There was a highly upvoted post (in a different subreddit) that completely dunked on nurses, and comments gleefully piled on. TL;DR: for this post, Private healthcare interests want you to scapegoat nurses, so they can continue to profit off your suffering. Don’t fall for it.
99 times out of 100, any problem a person may have with a nurse can be traced back to poor management on the hospital’s part or flaws in the healthcare system as a whole. For example, you feel like you’re getting ignored by a nurse? Ya, that’s because she taking care of 15 patients by herself.
Yet for some reason, instead of blaming the entities responsible for creating this hellscape, people would rather blame the workers who are constantly exploited and mistreated.
“But all we’re saying is nurses aren’t all angels/heros!”
Nurses have never tried to position themselves as heros or angels, and they actively fight against this framing. It brings the expectation that nurses should be happy to matry themselves. How interesting that nurses get blamed for something they didn’t do. I wonder who benefits from that….
“But hating nurses fights against ableism!”
Nursing as a profession is one of the highest ranked for workplace injuries. Or in other words, one of the professions that disable people the most. You cannot fight for disability justice while marginalizing a workforce that is disproportionality disabled.
In light of the upheaval caused by Covid, there has been a spike in nurse unionization. The rise in anti-nurse sentiment is a deliberate attempt to undermine this effort. Don’t be a useful tool for union busters.
Nurses are just as angry as you are about the issues people hate and blame them for. Holding solidarity with them brings you closer to fixing those issues.