Question re: Health Dept. hours

Specialties Public/Community

Published

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.

Specializes in public health.

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.

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