While we are beginning to measure the cost of burnout among healthcare professionals, it is also time to measure what the solutions deliver. Investing in the mental health of those who provide care is not an expense: it is a highly profitable investment, one that pays off in hours of care, stable teams and healthier patients.

In a previous article, I explained that burnout among healthcare professionals is not a matter of chance, but the result of a structural mismatch between a soaring demand for care and resources that are certainly increasing, but at a slower pace than needs. The argument was as follows: inaction has a cost that remains largely hidden. Let us now turn to solutions, through the considerable medium- and long-term savings they generate.

On 29 April 2026, the OECD published The Economic Case for Preventing Mental IllHealth, highlighting that poor mental health affects more than one in five people in the general population across OECD and European Union countries. It costs European health systems €76 billion a year, or 6% of their budgets, and could reduce the European Union's GDP by around 1.7% per year by 2050.

Other figures add to the impact: the loss of workforce is equivalent to 2.4 million full-time workers every year. 36% of this loss comes from presenteeism, compared with only 14% from absenteeism. In other words, most of the cost is not visible in staff absences, but in the fact that a significant proportion of staff, because of their exhaustion, come to work but not at full capacity.

The report shows that preventionand action pay off. Most of the modelled interventions are cost-effective, andsome even save money.

The OECD report focuses on the general population without specifying the situation of healthcare professionals. Yet in hospitals, burnout triggers chains of costs.

In French public hospitals, health-related absences reached 18.1 days per employee in 2022, representing €4.4 billion in salaries paid (IGAS-IGF, 2024). Caregivers with severe burnout are absent 13.6 days per year, compared with 5.4 days for those least affected (Borritz et al., 2006).

A physician with burnout is twice as likely to leave their institution within two years. Each departure costs between $268,000 and $957,000 in recruitment and onboarding (Hamidi et al.,2018). For a nurse, temporary replacement alone accounts for 44% of the cost of a departure (Roche et al., 2015).

Burnout doubles the risk of patient safety incidents among physicians (Hodkinson et al., 2022). In France, a postoperative sepsis costs the hospital more than €20,000 extra, and a healthcare-associated infection €11,000 (Nestrigue and Or, IRDES, 2012).

These costs are not hypothetical.They are already being paid, every year, out of hospital budgets. The question is therefore not whether we can afford to invest, but whether we can afford to keep paying without changing anything.

The good news is that the solutions are known and their effects are measurable. The EuropeanMagnet4Europe project demonstrated this in 56 hospitals across six countries. In the institutions that transformed their work organisation the most, nurse burnout fell by 6.3 points. Intention to leave decreased by 7.6 points, and unfavourable ratings of patient safety by 3.7 points (Aiken et al., 2026).

And the financial return follows. In the United States, the cost of nurse turnover attributable to burnout falls from $16,736 to $11,592 per nurse per year in hospitals with a prevention programme, a saving of almost 30% (Muir et al., 2022). At Stanford, halving burnout would save between $7.8 million and $27.8 million in recruitment costs over two years (Hamidi et al., 2018).

One nuance matters, however, and the OECD highlights it: not all interventions are equal. A universal workplace cognitive therapy programme returns only €0.60 per euro invested, whereas a targeted scheme returns more than ten. Approaches that rely solely on individual resilience yield modest results. It is organisational levers that pay off the most: adequate staffing, close managerial support, peer support and autonomy at work. Invest, yes; but invest in solutions that deliver genuine, lasting and measurable improvement.

Burnout works like a viciouscircle. A departure that is not replaced increases the workload of those who remain. Their exhaustion grows, absences multiply, and temporary agency stafff ill some of the gaps at a high price. Errors become more likely and the institution's attractiveness collapses. Each link feeds the next.

Well-targeted investment reverses this mechanism. A less exhausted team takes fewer absences and stays longer. The money saved on agency staff and recruitment can be reinvested in working conditions. Stable caregivers know their patients, coordinate their care better and make fewer errors. A hospital where people work well attracts staff and recruits more easily. Every euro invested produces effects that reinforce one another, year after year.

This is why we must stop reasoning in terms of annual cost. A burnout prevention policy should be evaluated as an investment: over several years, taking into account all of its returns, including those that do not appear on any budget line.

If the solutions pay off, why are they not deployed everywhere? The OECD gives the answer: a lack of large-scale implementation. And behind this lack of implementation there is often a lack of evidence. A hospital director cannot decide in favour of a programme without knowing either the costs it avoids or how long it will take to pay back. InEurope, the most recent study on the cost of nurse turnover dates back to 1996 (Maier et al., 2026). There is an urgent need to update these data.

This is the purpose of WP5 of APOLLO2028, the Horizon Europe project dedicated to the mental health and resilience of healthcare professionals. Having identified, with experts from seven countries, the consequences of burnout that genuinely weigh on institutions, we are valuing them one by one: absenteeism, presenteeism, turnover, reduced working hours, quality of care, deteriorated working relationships, medical errors, malpractice suits, patient satisfaction and medication errors.The ultimate goal is to set, against every euro invested in a solution, the euros it saves.

This approach changes the nature of the debate. Burnout prevention is no longer a well-being issue. It becomes a performance lever that can be quantified and compared.

Europe will be short of nearly one million healthcare professionals by 2030. In this context, every caregiver who leaves exhausted is a loss we can no longer compensate for. Protecting their mental health is essential. It is the condition for the sustainability of our hospitals.

The OECD report gives us reason for hope: well-designed interventions are cost-effective, and sometimes highly so. It also sets us a goal: to deploy them at scale and to measure what they deliver. With the APOLLO2028 project, we hope to provide decision-makers with insights that are currently lacking. When the return on prevention is as visible as its cost, the decision to invest will no longer be up for debate.