There's a lot of hand wringing comments about the demand side but don't forget the supply side.
Jobs come with a lot of baggage. Could I make a good doctor in an abstract sense? Hell yes, I thrive at diagnosing complicated technical systems under pressure working closely with people. However I am sensitive to lack of sleep and when I inevitably kill someone during my training hazing when you have to work 36 straight hours without sleep, I'd... react rather poorly to having killed them over basically being too much of a coward to say F that hazing tradition. So I can't become a doctor. The problem would be the hazing but the firing paperwork would be some BS like culture fit, and I'm smart enough to predict the whole thing so I'm not even gonna try. A pity, I'd be a hell of a good doc.
Likewise we've loaded the psychology of nursing with certain baggage that only a fraction of the population is going to tolerate. The reason the supply of nurses is limited is not because we lack for the technical ability to learn to give sponge baths or ability to follow surgeons orders to assist them. I think we pretty much have all the people nursing who can fit the precise psychological cookie cutter of stereotypical nurse and folks who don't fit that cutter will have their money taken in classrooms but they'll get weeded out of the field. Leading to "how we gonna retrain these excess unemployable nurses?" and maybe we'll torture them with some other field requiring a unique unusual personality, like psychologist or chef, and when they fail that, we'll collect tuition retraining all of them to be ...
We're only allowed culturally to talk about changing employees never changing the employer or the workplace itself. Which is unfortunately the thing most needing changing now.
So its a forbidden thought to consider that the problem is we need to accept drill sgt like nurses and construction dude like nurses not just nurse like nurses. Or its a forbidden thought that I could become an ER doc without the required lack of sleep hazing. But if you want to actually fix broken systems sometimes you need to at least think about forbidden thoughts.
A world where its safe to question why a nurse can't tell a patient to F themselves when they need to be told to F themselves or where its safe to question why a new doc needs to go thru hazing at the cost of patient lives is a better world. Its not exclusively about convincing students to enter fields where everyone knows they're not gonna fit and then shrugging shoulders when they inevitably don't fit and wash out. Sometimes fields suck and need fixing.