Health Bureaucracy is an increasing burden for Swiss doctors
A recent survey shows that administrative tasks in the healthcare sector are taking up more and more time and making doctors' work more difficult.
11.11.2024, 12:50
11.11.2024, 13:07
SDA
A recent survey of Swiss doctors shows that the administrative workload in their day-to-day work is continuing to increase. This development means that there is less time for direct patient care.
According to a survey conducted by the JRC Bern research institute, the daily documentation workload in acute care has risen from 114 to almost 120 minutes. These results were published by the online platform "Medinside". The increase in documentation time is particularly significant in psychiatry, where the daily expenditure increased from 91 to 100 minutes compared to the previous year.
Less time for patients
The survey also shows that the time spent on patient-related activities has fallen by around eleven minutes to around 102 minutes. In contrast, more time was spent on ward rounds, with doctors in acute care estimating an average of 54 minutes per day, an increase of three minutes compared to the same period in the previous year.
Challenges due to official requirements
A quarter of outpatient doctors feel that writing medical records and reports is the most time-consuming request from authorities and insurance companies. Among inpatient doctors in acute somatics, psychiatry and rehabilitation, the processing of applications is seen as particularly time-consuming. Both outpatient and inpatient doctors consider the time and effort required for documentation as well as queries and complaints from insurance companies to be burdensome. The majority of respondents consider the official requirements to be "rather" or "definitely" superfluous.
Survey results at a glance
1,707 people took part in the representative survey, which is conducted annually by the Bern Research Institute on behalf of the FMH, the Swiss Medical Association. These included 1324 hospital doctors from the fields of acute somatics, psychiatry and rehabilitation as well as 383 outpatient physicians.
