Having a hospitalist position with no weekend time is potentially a huge plus.
Really, I think it depends 100% on how many calls per night you get. If you get 1 call every hour, this is a really bad situation. If you get one call per week, it's totally fine.
Also depends on what you like to do with your weeknights. If going out to see movies is a big deal, you may get interrupted a bunch.
That and the acuity/severity of illness of the admitted patients are the real wild card here.
As to the OP:
Full disclaimer, I do agree with the conclusion of most of the posters but for an admittedly 100% personal point of view that factors in my dislike of rural places and my dislike of small hospitals where I would not be exposed to slightly more interesting cases.
From a completely analytical point of view, I really cannot give you an advise in regards to whether this is actually a reasonable option, a very good one or a very bad one.
You have two extreme.
One extreme is painted by a few of the previous posters. You are stuck with a 120h/week "5 day call" schedule and you are valued at a miserable $50/h.
The other extreme is that you end up having a small census that you can see in half a day, you can get back at home by lunch time and then you only get 2-3 calls per day, most of them 5 mins or less long and you only have to return to the hospital for 1h or so two or three times a month or less and hardly any call at all are between midnight and 5 am. I bet this other extreme would make a lot of people happy.
Reality is likely somewhere in between. If everything that you have found out about this job is still keeping you in the hook, perhaps investigating more about it could be a wise choice. I suspect that there is someone out there that probably thinks this job is great. Or perhaps it sucks but you could get a chance to negotiate it to the point of being an amazing job. Perhaps if not more money $$ you could stipulate a hard rule/contract that you are not supposed to be called between 12am and 6am and that anything that happens during this time is being covered by on-site staff, or perhaps you could talk them into getting a midlevel to help you out. Who knows.
If everything you have heard so far keeps attracting you, keep investigating and if you keep liking what you hear consider giving it a try.
Who knows, maybe 5 years down the line you are the one posting "Hey guys, here how I became filthy rich while having a sweet gig. I got this job that I can do without rushing in half a day most of the times, then I go home and see a few patients on telemedicine. I do have to take a few calls from time to time but they are rarely after 8pm because the hospital staff is amazing. Rarely I have to go in the middle of the night because they called me for an urgent matter but this occurs maybe once a month or so on average. On weekends 2 weekends per month I am driving to the nearest city to do so locums and I get paid about 8k/month extra because of this. I am making $500k while having minimal expenses on this cheap, rural area and I get to deduct 1 room for office space (telemedicine), depreciation of my car because of long commute on weekends as well as gas, I could retire in 3 more years if I wanted.
Yeah, it is farfetched. But the point I wanted to illustrate is that this is not a typical job. So you cannot necessarily compare it to any 7/7 12h shift job out there. It is simply not apple to apple comparison.
Again, the wildcard is how many calls, what sort of things they would call you for, and what sort of things would prompt you to go back to the hospital vs on-site staff managing this.
I don't know what would be my rate if I had to answer call 5/7 24. However, we can run a thought experiment. If you value your time at $500/hour (premium because a portion of those hours would be at night, and you consider 50k of your compensation to be paid for those calls, and assume the average call length to be 5minutes you would be fullfilling this sort of equation with about ~5calls day. You have a census of ~10patients on average, probably low acuity and complexity because I would think most serious patients would probably be transferred to some other location. That is not a lot of material as to generate a steady stream of more than 5 calls per days on average.
Like I said before, I wouldn't personally take this just based on the rural part of it. On the other hand, I don't think it is reasonable to just dismiss this in a blanket statement without seeing what sort of expected work you are potentially supposed to do.
Good luck in your search.
