It's almost 7 p.m.
The last round has been completed. Patients are settled in, prescriptions have been given, and the ward is gradually returning to calm.
Yet the day isn't over.
There are handover notes to write, reports to complete, information to track down — sometimes the same data has to be entered multiple times across different software systems.
This scene has become commonplace in many hospitals. And that's precisely what makes it concerning.
Since the health crisis, burnout among healthcare workers has become an issue impossible to ignore. Testimonies keep multiplying, but above all, the data keeps piling up.
Studies published in recent years paint a worrying picture. In hospitals, 41% of professionals show symptoms of mild to severe depression, compared to 33% in the working population as a whole. At the same time, nearly one in two hospital nurses leaves the hospital or changes profession after ten years of practice.
These figures tell a complex story. Burnout is never explained by a single cause. Staffing levels, work organization, hours, recognition, and working conditions all play a role. Looking for a single explanation would be a mistake.
That said, there is one factor that institutions can act on more quickly than others: administrative workload.
Be careful, though, not to fall into another oversimplification. Administrative tasks are not a problem in themselves. They are essential to ensuring quality, continuity, and safety of care. The difficulty arises when the same information has to be looked up, verified, and re-entered across multiple systems — sometimes several times during a single patient's care.
That's exactly what this article sets out to explore: what the numbers actually say, what we currently know about the weight of administrative burden, and why the way information flows through hospitals has become a subject in its own right.
Burnout among healthcare workers is no longer just a string of anecdotes or a recurring media topic. For several years now, public bodies have been tracking its evolution, finally making it possible to measure the scale of the phenomenon.
Figures published by DREES (France's Directorate for Research, Studies, Evaluation and Statistics) are particularly telling. In hospitals, 41% of professionals show symptoms of mild to severe depression, compared to 33% among the working population overall. The picture is similar for anxiety: 30% of hospital staff report symptoms, versus 25% of other workers.
Taken in isolation, these percentages can seem abstract. But they reflect a very concrete reality: hospital professionals are more exposed to psychological distress than the rest of the French workforce.
Another figure is also worth a closer look. According to a second DREES study published in 2023, nearly one in two hospital nurses leaves the hospital or changes profession within ten years of entering the field.
It would be tempting to see this as a direct consequence of burnout. That would be jumping to conclusions too quickly. Career paths are shaped by many factors: opportunities for advancement, working conditions, pay, life choices, and work-life balance.
Even so, these data all point to the same conclusion: working in a hospital has become harder. And this difficulty goes well beyond the intensity of care alone.
In other words, the question is no longer whether healthcare workers face intense pressure — the data already answers that.
The real question lies elsewhere: what, in their day-to-day work, keeps fueling this fatigue?
That's where administrative burden comes in.
When people talk about administrative burden, many picture a stack of forms or a few minutes spent filling out paperwork at the end of the day.
The reality is often more diffuse.
Administrative work isn't just the moment spent writing a report or filling out a mandatory form. It's also present in all the small tasks that pile up throughout the day: tracking down a piece of information, double-checking data already entered elsewhere, switching between multiple software programs, copying a result, or filling in a field because another system failed to retrieve it automatically.
Taken individually, each of these actions seems trivial. Repeated dozens of times in a single day, however, they end up weighing heavily.
Precisely measuring this burden in hospitals remains difficult, as available data is still limited. Community medicine, however, offers useful benchmarks.
A survey of French general practitioners estimates that about seven hours a week are spent on administrative tasks. Another study, conducted as part of Dr. Jean-Baptiste Prunières's doctoral thesis, put the time spent on non-medical activities at 13 hours and 6 minutes per week, more than six hours of which is strictly administrative.
These results concern community medicine and can't be directly applied to hospitals, where organizations, teams, and tools differ. Even so, they point to a trend that's hard to ignore: a significant share of healthcare workers' time is spent on activities unrelated directly to patient care.
Even more telling, 78% of surveyed physicians believe this administrative burden keeps increasing — a perception that reaches nearly 90% among practitioners aged 40 to 50.
The problem isn't that administrative tasks exist. They're essential — they ensure traceability of care, continuity, and patient safety.
The difficulty arises when these tasks become repetitive — when information that's already known has to be searched for, checked, and re-entered multiple times in systems that don't communicate with one another.
At that point, it's no longer just a few minutes disappearing. It's dozens of interruptions fragmenting an already packed day.
When burnout among healthcare workers comes up, one explanation is almost always offered: they work too much.
That statement isn't wrong. It's simply incomplete.
Two professionals can work the exact same number of hours and still end their day in very different states of exhaustion.
Why? Because not all fatigue is the same.
Consider two scenarios.
In the first, a doctor sees patients back-to-back all morning. They listen, examine, talk with patients, and make medical decisions. The pace is intense, but their attention stays focused on a single activity: caring for patients.
In the second, that same morning is broken up by dozens of interruptions. A piece of information is missing from the file. A test result has to be found in another program. A prescription needs verifying. Data already entered elsewhere has to be entered again.
The phone rings. One window opens, then another.
By the end of the morning, the same amount of time has passed. But the feeling of exhaustion is not the same at all.
This phenomenon is well documented in occupational psychology. Every interruption forces the brain to switch context, retrace what it was doing, and refocus. Taken individually, these switches seem harmless. Added up over a full day, they represent a genuine cognitive load.
This is also why the issue can't simply be reduced to hours spent in front of a screen.
Software can become a valuable aid. It can also become an additional source of fatigue. It all depends on what it demands from staff.
A system that forces users to look for information across multiple applications, re-enter the same data several times, or constantly switch between interfaces adds invisible friction to daily work.
Conversely, when information is available in the right place, at the right time, without extra manipulation, the benefit isn't measured only in minutes saved — it's also measured in energy preserved.
And that's probably one of the hardest aspects to quantify.
No one quits their profession because of a single instance of re-entering data. But hundreds of micro-interruptions, repeated day after day, end up transforming how a workday is experienced.
That's precisely what the numbers still struggle to capture — but it's also what hospital teams increasingly describe when talking about their daily reality.
Large-scale national surveys can reveal a trend, but they don't tell the whole story.
In recent years, some institutions have also started publishing their own internal indicators on staff mental health — and here too, the results are worth examining closely.
At AP-HP, Europe's largest university hospital system, an internal barometer published in 2024 shows that 34% of staff report frequently feeling stressed at work. Among university hospital physicians, that proportion reaches nearly one in two.
These figures alone don't explain the causes of this fatigue. They do, however, confirm that the distress observed in national studies is also present in the day-to-day life of individual institutions.
Another publication, by Delézire and colleagues (2024), points in the same direction. The authors show that work-related psychological distress has risen sharply in France over the past fifteen years, across all sectors. The hospital world is naturally no exception to this trend.
But there's an important difference between reading these figures and confronting them with reality on the ground.
For more than ten years, Galeon's teams have worked alongside healthcare institutions. Across deployments in the 19 hospitals that currently use the platform, one observation comes up repeatedly in conversations with professionals.
It's not so much the number of tools that's the problem — it's the fact that each one operates in its own silo.
For a single patient's care, a healthcare worker may need to check several applications, look for information that's already available elsewhere, or enter the same unchanged data more than once.
These aren't dramatic situations. They're small frictions. They sometimes last only a few seconds. But they repeat dozens of times a day.
And over time, they become almost invisible — until you realize just how much time and energy they consume.
This is precisely why the question of hospital information systems now goes beyond a purely technical issue. It's gradually becoming a matter of work organization — and, by extension, a matter of quality of work life.
It would be naive to think that a new piece of software alone could solve healthcare worker burnout.
The reality is more complex. Staff shortages, how departments are organized, budget constraints, and working conditions will continue to weigh on teams' daily lives.
That said, this doesn't mean nothing can be done.
Every minute lost searching for information that already exists, re-entering data, or navigating between multiple programs is a minute not spent with patients.
This is exactly where technology can have a concrete impact — not by replacing healthcare workers, not by automating human interaction, but by eliminating repetitive tasks that add no value to patient care.
A better-organized patient record won't make hospital pressure disappear. But it can prevent part of that pressure from coming from the tools themselves.
The distinction matters. Because the real goal isn't to ask healthcare workers to work faster — it's to make sure they have less time to lose.
Burnout among healthcare workers is a complex phenomenon. There is no single solution.
But some causes are now well identified. Among them, the fragmentation of information systems and the repetition of many administrative tasks are increasingly well documented.
Technology will never replace staffing levels, recognition, or better organization of services. But it can eliminate some of the friction that makes daily work harder.
And sometimes, it's exactly these small frictions that end up making the biggest difference.
