When is the official end of days? Perhaps when there are homeless nurses. In a report on English homelessness, the local government and social care ombudsman said that even people with stable jobs were now struggling to find somewhere affordable to live. This included people from many different walks of life – council workers, taxi drivers, hospitality workers and nurses, who were among the people who’d been placed in emergency accommodation, sometimes for unlawful amounts of time, and who’d ended up seeking advice about their unsafe, insanitary and otherwise unacceptable conditions.

As the ombudsman pointed out, this further undermines the notion that homelessness is only suffered by people with chaotic lives, drunk/drug habits, and no steady jobs. This is the whispered subtext of certain attitudes and rationalisations about homelessness – that it only happens to Other People. This distancing may have contributed to the Home Office feeling justified in rounding up, detaining, and even deporting east European rough sleepers. (The high court has just ruled that this is illegal and discriminatory.) On a human level, an emotional detachment regarding the homeless may explain how it becomes possible to walk past people, young and old, huddled in shop doorways; to buy into the narrative that, in every case, they have not only unfortunate, but also incomprehensible and messy lives, or have simply brought it upon themselves.

Now, however, homelessness has gone mainstream, so to speak. It not only affects “normal” families, it even affects those with jobs – like nursing – that are traditionally respected by society. This seems almost unfathomable. How could it be possible, in a civilised country, that nurses can spend their working days caring for the sick, and yet still be unable to afford a secure place for themselves, and, too often, their families?

The complicated answer certainly encompasses nursing pay. With each successive decade, it’s becoming increasingly clear that nurses are considered to be “angels”, except when they start entertaining grand ideas about being paid properly. In this way, nurses becoming homeless is much easier to understand. Take away the typical instinctive response to nurses, the gratitude and affection in which they’re still widely held, and it becomes clear that, on their average pay scales, they would be as vulnerable as many others to getting into difficulty with rent, bills, and debt.

Add to this more generalised factors, including the twin behemoths of the decline in available social housing, and the rise of the private landlord. Private landlords are not only becoming more loath to accept homeless tenants from councils (or anybody who may be reliant for a period on insufficient or non-existent housing benefit), they’re increasingly inclined to evict existing tenants in the hope of charging higher rents. Obviously, just like anyone else, nurses could get caught up in this – their jobs don’t render them magically immune to unscrupulous behaviour, or to the high cost of living.

Then there’s the wider, scarier narrative – that this is a country that not only has rising numbers of homeless people (bad enough), it even has homeless nurses. And, it would appear, enough of them for an ombudsman to feel the need to make specific mention.

Some might say that all homeless people, whatever their stories and circumstances, deserve sympathy and support, and they’d be right. However, homelessness among nurses might still represent a troubling societal shift – a wake-up call that something very bad is being normalised right under our noses. While no one is trying to stage a moral competition in suffering, if the idea of homeless nurses becomes acceptable, then what next? If a job such as nursing can’t guarantee an individual the most basic levels of security and dignity, can’t even give them an affordable place to live, then it’s not a case of worrying when and how will be the end of days. It’s happening right now.