night float is good b/c:
you get to go home a turn your pager off when you leave the hospital. i went to med school at a place where there was no night float and the residents were constantly receiving phone calls about their patients at night (all night) because they didn't sign out to the on call team. that totally sucked. so it's nice to walk out of the hospital at whatever time, and be done until the next morning.
night float is bad because:
a lot can happen in one 10 hour period. i don't know if you have ever experienced pikcing up a patient who has already been in the hospital for several days, and then you come in in the middle. it's pretty hard to get the full picture ever. so having night float can be similar. you patient could go down hill over night, you come in the next morning and don't even recognize your patient because of what transpired overnight. it can be hard to catch up on that stuff.
to me, night float=good. i would rather spend a few extra minutes in the morning trying to wrap my brain around whatever happened overnight, rather than be up all night dealing with it.
there is a happy medium, though. the program that i went to school at really sucked because they didn't have their residents sign out to the on call team, so they were ALWAYS on call (even post call, their pagers were on). But most places don't do it that way. When you leave you sign out your patients to your on call team and you are done with it.
But the reality is...I DON'T CARE. you can see by my signature that i am EM, so for me night float v long call v whatever, is really irrelevant.
just my two cents.........