The Holiday You Can Actually Take: Why Annual Leave Hits Different in Digital Health
Written by Rod on June 29, 2026
By Rod Gamble | Week 27, 2026 | Pillar 1: Work Life Balance
You booked the holiday. You paid the deposit. Your bag is half-packed in the corner of the bedroom. And four days before you are due to leave, your manager pulls you aside and says, “I am so sorry, but with the staffing situation we are going to have to ask you to cancel.”
If you are a clinician reading this and your stomach just clenched — I see you. This has happened to almost every nurse, doctor, and allied health professional I have ever coached. It is one of the quiet, corrosive cruelties of clinical work. And it is one of the very first things that changes the day you move into digital health.
This week I want to talk about something that sounds small but is actually huge: what annual leave looks like on the other side of the transition. Because if you have spent a decade defending your two weeks in August with the desperation of someone planning a prison break, you have no idea how different it can be — and you cannot fully heal until you have lived it.
The Annual Leave Wound Almost Every Clinician Carries
Let me put a few numbers on the table.
Healthcare workers in the US, UK, and Ireland repeatedly report that one of the strongest predictors of burnout is not the hours themselves — it is the loss of control over them. The NHS Confederation, the BMA, and HSE Ireland have all documented the same pattern: when clinicians cannot take, or cannot trust, their booked leave, exhaustion stops being a phase and becomes a permanent residency.
You know the rituals. The unspoken pressure to apologise for asking. The leave you book six months ahead and still find yourself defending. The mid-shift phone call that drags you back in because someone else has phoned in sick. The holiday spent half on email because you cannot fully relax knowing what is waiting for you on Monday.
Most non-clinicians do not understand this wound at all. They book a week off. They take it. They come back. There is no drama. Reading that paragraph back, I imagine some of you laughing — because the idea that taking a week off could be that uneventful belongs in a different universe to the one you have been working in.
My Own Reset — From 150,000 Miles a Year to a Calendar That Was Mine
I have written before about how, at 19, I set a goal that sounded ridiculous given my circumstances. I wanted to travel the world, have someone else pay for it, and earn at least 200,000 dollars a year doing it. I had no idea how I was going to make any of that happen. I just kept the goal in my head and connected every new skill I learned to it.
When I finally combined clinical, technical, and leadership skills, I became — in the language of my recruiter at the time — a hot commodity. I started travelling all over the United States, then negotiated a 300,000 dollar contract to work outside the US. Some weeks I was in four different countries. 150,000 air miles a year. Six trips around the world annually.
That sounds glamorous. Some of it was. But the thing that genuinely changed my life was not the air miles. It was that my calendar finally belonged to me. When I wanted to be still, I could be still. When I wanted to take a fortnight off and visit a country that had nothing to do with work, nobody phoned me at hour eighteen to ask if I could cover a shift. The work waited. The world kept turning. The deliverables got delivered.
I had spent years on the wards believing that if I stopped sprinting, the whole system would collapse. It took moving into digital health for me to discover that the system does not collapse. It just adjusts. And the version of me that returned from real, uninterrupted time off was a measurably better professional than the version that had never been allowed to rest.
What Annual Leave Actually Looks Like in Digital Health
Let me be specific, because vague reassurance is no use to a tired clinician.
In most digital health roles — whether you are working for a health-tech vendor, an NHS digital programme, an Irish e-health initiative, a US informatics group, or as an independent consultant — annual leave is treated as a planning matter, not a permission matter. You book it. You hand off your workstreams. You go.
The asynchronous nature of the work makes this possible. Most digital health deliverables are measured in sprints, weeks, and quarters, not in minutes and hours. Your absence is a project-management problem, not a clinical-safety problem. Nobody dies because the EHR configuration ticket sits in the backlog for ten days. The patient meeting can be rescheduled. The product roadmap accommodates you.
Remote and flexible working amplifies this further. There is no rota to reconfigure. There is no agency nurse to find. You do not return to a ward that has been short three bodies for the entire fortnight you were away. You return to your laptop, you read the Slack history, and you pick up the thread.
And here is the part that quietly heals a lot of clinicians: nobody guilts you for taking it. The cultural expectation in modern digital health — particularly in the better-run organisations — is that rest is a tool, not a betrayal. The leaders who built these companies often came from high-pressure environments themselves. They know what burnout costs. They protect the leave.
Steps You Can Take Now
Whether you are already inside digital health or still building the bridge, here is where to start this week.
1. Audit the cost of cancelled leave. Sit down and list the holidays you have lost, postponed, or worked through in the last five years. Put a financial figure beside each one. The number is usually shocking. You are not soft for being affected by this — you have lived through a sustained pattern of being denied rest.
2. Pre-write your “no” script. Practise the language you will use when you book leave in your next role. Something as simple as “I am away from the 14th to the 28th. Here is my handover.” No apology. No qualifier. No “if that is alright with you.” Get used to the new register.
3. Plan your first proper holiday before you take the digital role. Decide where you would go if leave was guaranteed. Book it provisionally. Treat it as part of the transition deliverable, not an indulgence to be earned later.
4. Choose digital health employers carefully. In your interviews, ask directly: “How does leave work here? How often does it get pushed back? What does cover look like when someone is away?” The answer tells you everything about the culture.
5. Take all of it. When you do land in digital health, do not be the clinician who carries a week of unused leave into the new year out of habit. The leave is part of the compensation. Use it. Every hour.
Ready to Build a Career That Lets You Rest?
Inside my IMPACT coaching programme — Innovate, Momentum, Problem-Solving, Adaptability, Courage, Transformation — we work on exactly this kind of recalibration. The Adaptability and Courage pieces are usually where the holiday-related wounds get unpacked, because both of them are required to believe, at a nervous-system level, that you are allowed to stop.
I coach clinicians in the US, UK, and Ireland through every stage of the digital health transition — from the first whisper of “there must be more than this” all the way to the first holiday they take in their new career without checking their phone once.
If that sounds like the version of your life you are ready to build, I would love to hear from you. Send me a direct message, comment below, or visit my profile to find out how we can work together. The leave is real. The career that protects it is real. And you have earned the right to actually take it.
References
1. World Health Organization (2024). Mental health at work: policy brief on workplace stress and burnout. Geneva: WHO.
2. British Medical Association (2025). Mental health and wellbeing in the medical profession: 2025 survey of UK doctors. London: BMA.
3. American Medical Association (2025). 2025 National Burnout Benchmarking Report. Chicago: AMA.
4. Health Service Executive Ireland (2025). Healthy Workplace Framework: addressing workforce wellbeing in the Irish health service. Dublin: HSE.
5. NHS Confederation (2025). The cost of cancelled leave: workforce burnout and retention in the modern NHS. London: NHS Confederation.
6. Royal College of Nursing (2025). Annual leave and holiday pay: guidance for nursing staff. London: RCN.
7. Maslach, C. and Leiter, M.P. (2022). The Burnout Challenge: Managing People’s Relationships With Their Jobs. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
8. Health Education England (2025). Digital, data and technology workforce: career pathways for clinicians moving into digital health roles.
