From reading OP's posts, it sounds like her husband is a locum consultant. That means he doesn't have a permanent position but instead is employed on a temporary contract. This is actually fairly common. Locum contracts might be for a few weeks, a few months, a year or more, or done on a month-to-month basis long-term. A locum might, for example, cover someone's maternity leave in one place, then move to a vacant post elsewhere to cover someone's secondment, then move to bridge the gap between someone retiring and the new person starting.
There are a lot of jobs that can't just be done at your local hospital. Not every hospital has all specialties in it - a lot of health boards/trusts may have a system where, for example, one hospital has the area's renal specialists, another has the neonatal unit, another has the cardiac cath lab. And even if your local hospital has a specialty, that doesn't mean they'll have a consultant vacancy in it.
Getting a first permanent consultant post can be hard, just like getting your foot in the door in any field. Let's say that an opportunity comes up to apply for one at a hospital near his family, near good schools and transport links, etc. Great, he puts in his application. So do other people who want to work in the nice convenient area with the good schools. And those people may well include people with years of consultant-level experience, additional qualifications and skills, publications, etc. If he gets the job, that's good, but if he doesn't, then another job in that team may not come up for several years.
A lot of people therefore spend a few years doing locum jobs, in part to build up a good CV and make future applications competitive.
If OP and her husband are now in a situation that can't be maintained by them long-term, then he may well need to explore options for non-consultant posts closer to home. Other options could include compressing hours, moving to less-than-full-time, outsourcing more and using technology to stay in touch more during the week, etc.