It was only after losing a patient during the pandemic, a loss that was partly due to being stretched too thin, that Amy and others began to think: This isn’t a personal failure, it’s a systemic failure. Even before patient counts rose, the workplace culture had already celebrated nurses who pushed themselves to the brink with more responsibilities

Fighting a rising tide of paperwork and bureaucracy, providers of health care, whether physicians, nurses, or administrators, say that time has become a scarce resource of which they have far too little.