Emergency medicine consultant Rob Galloway moved to 3.5 days a week, choosing part-time work over burning out and leaving medicine for good.
Professor Rob Galloway is a consultant in emergency medicine at University Hospitals Sussex. He’s worked part-time in this role, with great success, for two years. He has several reasons, not least including helping to provide support to his daughter, Frankie, 2, who has an exceptionally rare genetic condition, called DeSanto-Shinawi Syndrome.
DeSanto-Shinawi syndrome leaves patients unable to make certain proteins crucial in early brain development. Very little research has ever been undertaken into the condition and currently, no medical treatments are on offer – just physio and speech and language therapy, for example.
Rob and his wife Laura are both from a medical background. They read about scientists at the Mayo Clinic in the US, who had tested an epilepsy drug in the cells of a child with the condition. The researchers said they saw signs of possible benefit when the child later took the medication. This inspired Rob and Laura to set up a charity designed to fund research to test treatments, not just for her condition, but for hundreds of other ultra-rare genetic neurodevelopmental disorders too.
Called Rare People, the charity aims to raise crucial funds for much needed research into rare genetic neurodevelopmental (brain development) conditions in children. Rob and Laura do not take a salary from the charity. 100 per cent of donations go towards trials as the trustees and founders currently cover the running cost of the charity.
Frankie’s condition and needing to run the charity were not the only drivers for Rob to move to a part-time role (though it was the key one). He has five children, aged from 2 to 19, and wanted to spend more time with all of them.
Rob also chose to work part-time to support an ambition to live a more healthy life. Rob says: “I spent 25 years in A&E, doing much more than full-time hours, seeing the very worst things a person can see. When I was a senior NHS manager, I was going through one of the worst times of my life, running the medical staffing of a hospital during Covid, with children who really needed me at home, including our-year-old with very challenging behaviours. My dad was diagnosed with cancer and died early. We must understand that doctors can only take so much, before they burn out and leave. For me, it was go part-time or stop working in medicine completely.”
At University Hospitals Sussex, Rob works roughly 3.5 days/week. He spends 50 per cent of the time in his clinical role, and 50% teaching.
As a doctor in A&E, Rob has seen the impact of long hours and difficult rotas take its toll on staff, on both their physical and mental health. He said: “Traditional medical rotas come with an impossible human cost. After time, staff simply leave rather than to try and hang on by their fingernails. Things worried me. Unsafe gaps, chronic burnout and the complete mismatch between the way in which doctors actually work and how rotas are designed. I thought – there has to be another way.” He designed HealthRota – an online platform that uses annualised hours and self preference to build rosters. HealthRota began its initial trials in Rob’s own workplace: University Hospitals Sussex. Rob says: “That was 14 years ago, and we became one of the first emergency departments in the country to have just as many women consultants as men. Emergency medicine workforce planning had to change – and we were the vanguard.”
At night, one hour counts as two, incentivising people to take on the shifts that traditionally no-one wants and are extremely hard to fill, under traditional roster systems.
The innovative system is now used across more than 80 NHS trusts, predominantly for doctors, with particular uptake in Emergency Medicine and where workforce pressure is greatest. Rob’s impact on changing NHS practices saw him awarded the Health Service Journal’s Top Ten Wild Card Influencers in 2021.
Rob says: “Working part-time has stopped me burning out. It has allowed me to carry on work as a doctor. I love the teaching aspects. I have a quality of life that I couldn’t have hoped for years ago. It has opened up my life. I spend more time with my children. I can focus on Frankie’s needs. I can actively seek funds to look at treatments for other rare genetic conditions (a trial for DeSanto-Shinawi Syndrome has now been funded). I can also pursue other interests such as football. The buck stop is that it is impossible to work full-time in A&E for your whole career. Nobody wants all the doctors and nurses to leave – finding a better way was an imperative. And I believe I have done just that.”
Published October 2026
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