After a five-year hiatus, Anchorage’s health department is planning to bring back a scoring system for inspections in restaurants and other food-service facilities.

The Anchorage Department of Health and Human Services this week unveiled a 54-item scorecard along with a method for assessing points. Over the next month, the department will be gathering public comment on the proposed system; it aims to begin posting scores along with inspection reports online in January.

Regular municipal health inspections date back to at least the mid-1980s, and those results are available online, Tony Barrett, environmental health program manager, said in an interview.

Until five years ago, those inspections included a scoring system. But the department discontinued scoring after the 2009 revision of the municipality’s food code because the new code contained a higher number of possible violations, Barrett said. The number of items on the inspection sheet jumped from 44 to 54, adding violations related to sick restaurant workers and bare-hand contact with food.

Anchorage health officials then made the decision to hold off on the scoring portion of inspections until they were more accustomed to the new code requirements, Barrett said. In the meantime, inspectors have used a matrix, and their own judgment, to decide how many critical violations warrant a closure, he said.

As well as providing a clear measure for facilities and inspectors, Barrett said, the scoring system is intended to help the public understand online inspection reports.