I have a similar problem with the power company. Every day starting around 2200 (excluding Saturdays and US holidays), there are irregular voltage fluctuations in the 118-124 voltage range, which cause really annoying light flicker and might be damaging my appliances (3 water heaters, 2 microwaves, and an air conditioner all dead in the last 5 years), some of them new. It affects other neighbors and is clearly coming from the grid.
Repeatedly calling support (which initially was promising, since they had an engineer look into it and replaced the transformer and ran a new service entrance cable when I upgraded my load center [400 A service, and cost me about $12,000 but I was desperate]), simply led to me probably being marked as a nuisance customer. For all the same reasons listed in the linked article, they simply aren't equipped nor motivated to do anything about it.
I wonder if what you're experiencing is something called "ripple control" (in Australia).
Distribution companies send 10-40V signals through the system at much higher frequencies than the normal 50/60Hz of AC systems (750-1100Hz) to tell old controlled load devices to switch on or off to use cheap nighttime power.
Having said that, if your distribution company has no idea what it is then it makes this less likely.
As I've explained to my NP colleagues (ones that have already completed school), this actually helps them (the impending oversupply threatens NP wages, as some of them are already having trouble finding the job they want since the 45 different APP degree offerings create an unrestricted supply). And while this might discourage some people from entering nursing, that will again only decrease the supply, which will increase the wages since you cannot replace nurses. But that would be a bad thing, as hospitals are already in a crunch trying to find nurses and pay them fairly (a large and different discussion).
On the physician side, there's definitely big changes coming, and I'm banking on a move to up-front APPs and a few remote physicians overseeing things. But I'm actually also seeing a number of entities that hired a bunch of APPs and are now moving back to physicians only and saving money doing do (think urgent care, ED, inpatient), though some specialties work very efficiently with a primary APP or co-management model, particularly the procedural ones.
Why? As you said, hospitals have a hard time finding nurses (undersupply), so more nurses would be better for patients and hospitals. An influx of more nurses could ease the undersupply, but I don't see why it would necessary overcome it completely and even lead to the impeding oversupply.
I'm talking about an oversupply of APPs (most NPs and related degrees), not nurses. Nurses are currently in short supply (hence the travel nurse phenomenon where some of them are paid more than physicians).
Repeatedly calling support (which initially was promising, since they had an engineer look into it and replaced the transformer and ran a new service entrance cable when I upgraded my load center [400 A service, and cost me about $12,000 but I was desperate]), simply led to me probably being marked as a nuisance customer. For all the same reasons listed in the linked article, they simply aren't equipped nor motivated to do anything about it.