Surgery: salary vs hourly

[JDayBFL]

Interested in polling the Surgical PAs out there. 

A majority of the surgical subspecialty jobs tend to be salary + call stipend. I have found a few that were straight hourly and may tend to have a financial advantage as you can really get screwed over in surgery if you are straight salary.  

How are your contracts structured? and would you prefer a straight hourly vs salary structure? 

[AbeTheBabe]

Really depends on the practice. I am in ortho outpatient. I get a base salary and bonus of 10% of collections. Since I see a lot of post-ops and am not always first assist, my yearly bonus is only 15-20K. I know another PA who is really busy and works a bunch but makes 50K bonus. However, I leave when I'm done and leave early if I need to. I usually work 40-45 hours a week, and I don't do weekend/call/holidays.

[Randito]

I work in inpatient care for an abdominal organ transplant service. I’m salary and average 45-50 hours per week. I don’t take call. I would love to be paid hourly, but I don’t know many PAs in surgical fields that are paid for the hours they work unless they are called in from home. 

I will say that I am in a position where my surgical director tries to ensure thet I get out on time, probably because previous PAs and NPs have complained and eventually left the service. I don’t mind the hours, am glad to be done when I leave rather than signing out a bunch of work to the residents and have been able to use the longer ish hours as a bargaining chip. 

[beattie228]

I'm hourly for my surgical position. It's a rarity, but my experiences in the surgical world have been similar to yours i.e. add on cases, charting late, coming in early, etc. I opt for hourly plus call stipend for positions I work but as you mentioned, gigs like that aren't usually the norm.