I promise this will be my last question about working at a health department...do you work a lot of overtime or are you usually out around the time the clinic is to be closed?

Thank you for responding.

Almost all health departments (county or state) has a typical M-F, 8-5 hour. You will see some variances in some health departments. I know in certain places the hours can be flexible, like you can show up at 7 and leave at 4. Or work four 10 hours and take Friday off. But generally you won't expect to work over time. We are all paid on a monthly salary, which means I get paid the same whether I work 40 or 80 hours. You don't have to clock in or out in most places and if you work over 8 hours on one day you can certainly work less than 8 hours on a different day.

In our department we do punch in and out (we are hourly, not salaried....I'm a county employee, the county hospital nurses are hourly, and we're all in the same job category). We have some flexibility as pointed out above.....for instance I can usually work 10 hours on Tuesday if I need to leave a couple hours early on Thursday. In our department we can't go over 40 hours/week, because they'd have to find the $ in the budget for OT.

Always out at exactly 5pm when the health dept closes. The clinics stop taking patients at a certain time to allow for this.

Thank you everyone - this helps me decide to at least go ahead with the interview. I work bedside in a hospital now and while it's nice to have time off during the week I'd like to get into a different type of nursing, learn something new and stop with the 13-14 hour days. Just didn't want to get into a situation where overtime is all the time. Doesn't sound like it would be.

Just adding confirmation... I am salaried, but the rules at my county are 80 hours per every 2 week pay period for full time employees like myself. I work M-F, 8-5 when in clinic. We can flex our time though. In my role I do a fair amount of community outreach and sometimes do evening and weekend hours but I always get to take my time back within the pay period.