Health Board OKs change
By Phyllis Moore
Published in News on August 16, 2015 1:50 AM
The Wayne County Board of Health approved a proposal Wednesday to gradually revert the Health Department to being open five days a week.
Health Director Davin Madden introduced the "Integrated Work Week Proposal" he plans to submit to county commissioners and County Manager George Wood.
He said the move came in response to a request from Wood, who had expressed an interest in seeing all county offices be "open and accessible" five days a week.
Most county offices had first switched to the four-day schedule in Aug. 2008, as a cost savings measure recommended by then-County Manager Lee Smith and the commission. Offices operated the same number of hours but instead of five eight-hour days, converted to four 10-hour days, with Friday being the day most chose to be closed.
Over the years, there have been mixed feelings about the four-day-week, primarily surrounding services but also hardships on staff.
Madden said overall, Health Department employees adapted to the change, but agreed that the constraints of working longer days -- from 7 a.m. until 6 p.m. -- was an issue.
"We have some employees, they're happy to work, they're highly productive but on 11 hours a day, they know, they feel it and they were honest about it," he said.
For those with children, the concentrated workday was especially challenging.
Parents, especially single parents, found it difficult to drop off children by within those time constraints, he said.
"Day cares don't open before 7 and they don't close after 6 so we have put a lot of people on what we call alternate work schedule," he said. "It got really confusing -- some people were coming in at 7:30 and leaving at 5:30, taking no lunch, some were taking 15-, 30-minute lunch. It was a mess."
Shifting the operating hours of the Health Department to a five-day week will not only accommodate the needs of working parents, he said, but also benefit recruitment efforts and ensure the public receives services.
"The IWW schedule was designed to expand accessibility for clients on Fridays of each week as pertains to the approved county work schedule and to maintain critical elements of the existing schedule that enhances our recruitment opportunities and facilitates positive employee satisfaction," the memo said.
Madden said a survey was sent out to staff and several versions of the proposal were discussed before being presented to full staff in June.
"What we are going to propose is that we are open five days a week, Monday through Friday," he told the board. "We will have two congruent schedules running at the Health Department and only two. There will be the Monday through Thursday, 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. schedule and the Monday through Friday 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. schedule.
"We will have staff in three designations -- they'll either be permanently on the four-day week, permanently on the five-day week, or they'll be rotating (Fridays)."
The move allows the department to honor preferences while maintaining all essential services, such as vital records, family planning and maternal health.
"The reason we're doing that is because some of our critical staff of course were preferring the four-day workweek but we didn't have enough of the people in the five-day workweek to satisfy all of our clinical needs, so we decided that we would do a rotating schedule on a monthly basis," he said. "The number of staff will dictate the number of rotations."
The move will involve a bit more of a management component, he said, but potentially maintains employee satisfaction, Madden said.
"We have multiple employees that we hired here (under the four-day model) that want to keep that," he said. "We met that need without having to sacrifice quality of services, level of services and also being able to satisfy the county commissioners and county manager."
There are some unexpected by-products from the change, the health director said.
"By doing this we will actually have the Health Department open 48 hours a week," he said. "We'll actually be above and beyond what normal schedules would look like for an average Health Department.
"We will actually increase our capacity by 20 percent for service time. We'll maintain our expanded hours of 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Thursday as well as opening on Fridays from 8 to 5."
He said he believed the shift can be handled without having to hire additional staff, noting that some of it would occur naturally, through retirements.
"What we plan to do, as positions become vacant through attrition, was we re-advertise that position. We'll determine if it's a critical need five-day position to cover the Friday," he said. "If so, we'll advertise it as a five-day work schedule so they'll come under no illusion that they will be on a four-day.
"And because of that we'll be able to go ahead and set that up up-front and then over time we'll have less of a rotating staff."