The short answer is yes! I agree! There is a current nursing shortage because the conditions nurses are being asked to comply with conditions that do not allow for safe healthcare to take place nor for the staff to feel valued.
Since the onset of the global COVID-19 pandemic, nurses across the United States and elsewhere have had to meet the grueling demands of working with overwhelming patient loads, nurse understaffing, excessive hours, under-resourced facilities, a career's worth of burnout and compassion fatigue within a few short years, and more all without reinvestment by their higher-ups in their facilities into their physical health, mental health, and compensation. My opinion and frontline nursing opinions throughout the nation will tell those inquisitive about the subject that, we agree, the nursing shortage is not simply because a plethora of nurses have decided to leave the bedside; rather, the why is in those reasons I laid out above.
In some states, nurses are working at ratios of 1 nurse to 5 or 6 patients (even up to 7 or 8!), which can make their jobs difficult to plan their shift, find time to document/chart, cover break times, deliver high-quality patient-centered care, administered medications in a timely fashion, and address complications as they arise. These overwhelming patient loads can also increase the likelihood of committing a medical error, the sixth leading cause of death in the United States. Nurses are being asked to risk patient safety in order to increase profits for the hospital, rather than ensuring the safety of their patients by hiring more nurses to decrease the staff-patient ratios; quite antithetical to their oath and to the purpose of healthcare in general.
Because the facilities are overwhelmed and the hospitals do not pay to adequately staff their floors, the nurses currently on staff are asked to work sometimes 14 hour shifts, which also increase the likelihood of medical error; no patient deserves to be subjected to the 5-10% of medical errors that are deemed harmful because their nurse was tired.
Being subjected to so many patients and such long hours without feeling sufficiently appreciated, reimbursed, and cared after for your work can lead to compassion fatigue (where you do not care as much about the ailments of the patients) and burnout (the "wall" of exhaustion in which you feel you can no longer participate in the tasks being asked). This impacts not only the physical health of the patients but also the mental health; if they are in a medical facility, the chances of them not having a great day are likely high -- it can only be made worse by a nurse that does not sound empathetic towards their situation.
Healthcare facilities crumble without nurses; the majority of the patient's interaction will be with a nurse, contrary to what popular media will lead most to believe. So the bottom line is this: without concerted effort to reform a healthcare system that is business-run instead of patient- and staff-centered and without proficient reimbursement of nurses, there will continue to be a nursing shortage along with high staff turnover, more PRN/per diem nurses, and more travel nursing candidates, even as many new grads enter the field.