There would still be if it took years to get a nursing certification and essentially everyone with one was already employed. I can't just decide that I'm a nurse tomorrow and start on Monday, no matter what they pay.
If you never fixed the criterial pipeline sure you would have a temporary shortage because that was your bottleneck. But there are plenty of people with equivalent skills, past or military experience that could do the job or be trained quickly to do it. It’s just a lack of desire to actually deal with the problem
You don't need to pay millions. But when you pay the minimum wage and exploit those people to the maximum, you get what you sowed. When they find a minimum wage job with better working conditions, they flee.
In Italy IT salaries are going up, well above nurses ones, still there's not enough IT people. There simply isn't the people. Almost no one really grasp how bad is italian demography.