There are plenty of smart/brilliant nurses. And there are plenty of “I made it through med school but I’m a lousy doctor” although the profession’s ability to police itself and get rid of the dumb, incompetent ones is pretty lax.
But I don’t think it does much for the profession of nursing to insist (as many do on CC and IRL) that “it’s much harder or just as hard to get into a BSN program as it is to get into med school”. The statistical admissions rate at various programs doesn’t change reality on the ground- the bar is lower to become a nurse, and if a kid really wants to become a nurse, they can probably find a program somewhere somehow which will accept them. Not direct admit- but eventually they will find a program. And that is not the case for doctors- hence the marginal programs in the Caribbean which is the “Hail Mary Pass” of college grads who have exhausted their rejections in the USA.
It diminishes the professionalism of nursing to bang the drum on this. Yes, there are MD’s and the medical establishment who are working overtime to limit the scope of practice of PA’s and NP’s and for many of them it’s a financial issue-- limit access any way they can. But for some there are fact-based reasons (which have nothing to do with how smart someone is, and EVERYTHING to do with how rigorous their training was, how long their apprenticeship period is, how demanding their licensing exams are, etc.) why nursing is nursing and being a doctor is being a doctor, and blurring the lines may help rural areas with poor access to primary care and may help underserved populations with routine healthcare-- but that doesn’t make a smart and hard-working and dedicated nurse a physician.
I’m hearing a lot of this as Match Day approaches. The parents of the nurses who are already working and earning a nice paycheck gloating that “it’s just as hard to become a nurse as it is a doctor”, while they watch their friends kids who are fourth year med students waiting for the privilege of MORE years of training and no sleep and no work/life balance and a relatively modest paycheck.