Mancini speaks: new effort in food safety training

Posted on June 19, 2013 by Douglas Powell

In 2010, the Russian pavilion at Folklorama in Winnipeg (or, as the Guess Who were always introduced, from Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada), was implicated in a foodborne outbreak of Escherichia coli O157 that caused 37 illnesses and 18 hospitalizations.

The ethnic nature and diversity of foods prepared within each pavilion presents a unique problem for food inspectors, as each culture prepares food in their own unique way.

The Manitoba Department of Health and Folklorama Board of Directors realized a need to implement a food safety information delivery program that would be more effective than a 2-h food safety course delivered via PowerPoint slides. The food operators and event coordinators of five randomly chosen pavilions selling potentially hazardous food were trained on-site, in their work environment, focusing on critical control points specific to their menu. A control group (five pavilions) did not receive on-site food safety training and were assessed concurrently. Public health inspections for all 10 pavilions were performed by Certified Public Health Inspectors employed with Manitoba Health. Critical infractions were assessed by means of standardized food protection inspection reports.

Rob Mancini, a MS graduate of Kansas State University, a health inspector with the Manitoba Department of Health, and someone who seems perpetually young with cinematic good looks (bit of a man-crush) led a study of how to improve food safety at Folklorama and the results were published in the Oct. 2012 issue of the Journal of Food Protection.

He’s at it again, and will be reporting on follow-up research he subsequently conducted with almost no help from me and Chapman at the Canadian Institute of Public Health Inspector Conference in Winnipeg, on June 24th, 2013.

Mancini speaks: hands on food safety training

Posted on January 22, 2013 by Douglas Powell

The importance of training food handlers is acknowledged as critical to effective food hygiene. However, the effectiveness of traditional food safety training remains uncertain. Traditionally food safety training courses are delivered via class-room based settings or computer-based programs with little to no hands-on application. The literature suggests that adults learn best when they are actively involved in the learning process. Retention by participants is directly affected by the amount of practice during the learning; yet traditional food safety training is not delivered in this fashion.

I will be presenting at the National Environmental Health Association Educational Conference in Washington, DC July 9-11, 2013. I will be discussing my previous work on hands-on food safety training, a collaborated effort with Drs. Doug Powell, Ben Chapman, and Leigh Murray, as well as a new food safety training delivery program developed for multicultural temporary food service events.

New food safety training techniques required; with Kevin McDonald

Posted on October 10, 2012 by Douglas Powell

I don’t know Kevin McDonald but I’ve laughed with him for 20 years as one of the founders of the popular Canadian comedy troupe, Kids in the Hall.

I also regularly insert his videos into barfblog.com, and say catchlines to Amy like, How the Hell Could I Know, or I Can’t Help Blaming Myself, but I Also Can’t Help Not Caring, Slipped My Mind, and There’s Nothing Like Clean Sheets (and a rock hard alibi).

So who knew I’d have a grad student that knew Kevin.

But this is really about that graduate student, Rob Mancini, who got his research published.

It’s not a TV show, but for science nerds, it’s the credibility that counts.

New methods of food safety training need to be developed and health inspections do help correct unsafe food preparation practices, according to new research from Kansas State University.

Rob Mancini, a MS graduate of Kansas State and a health inspector with the Manitoba Department of Health, led a study of how to improve food safety at Folklorama in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, a 14-day temporary food service event that explores the many different cultural realms of food, food preparation, and entertainment.

The results were published in the Oct. issue of the Journal of Food Protection.

In 2010, the Russian pavilion at Folklorama was implicated in a foodborne outbreak of Escherichia coli O157 that caused 37 illnesses and 18 hospitalizations. The ethnic nature and diversity of foods prepared within each pavilion presents a unique problem for food inspectors, as each culture prepares food in their own unique way.

The results suggested no statistically significant difference in food inspection scores between the trained and control groups. However, it was found that inspection report results increased for both the control and trained groups from the first inspection to the second, implying that public health inspections are necessary in correcting unsafe food safety practices. The results further show that in this case, the 2 hour food safety course delivered via slides was sufficient to pass public health inspections. Further evaluations of alternative food safety training approaches are warranted.

“Rob was an outstanding graduate student and his research highlights the value of reality research,” said supervisor Dr. Douglas Powell, a professor of food safety in the Department of Diagnostic Medicine/Pathobiology at Kansas State University. “The research was done in the field, Rob took all his courses by distance, but we communicated regularly using electronic tools.

Other authors include Dr. Leigh Murray of the Dept. of Statistics at Kansas State, and Dr. Ben Chapman, an assistant professor at North Carolina State University.

A video highlighting the results of the research featuring Mancini and Kevin McDonald is available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLlrv-3266o&feature=youtu.be.

Investigating the potential benefits of on-site food safety training for Folklorama, a temporary food service event

01.oct.12

Journal of Food Protection®, Volume 75, Number 10, October 2012 , pp. 1829-1834(6)

Mancini, Roberto; Murray, Leigh; Chapman, Benjamin J.; Powell, Douglas A.

http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/iafp/jfp/2012/00000075/00000010/art00014

Ex-Chicago contractor took bribes for food safety certifications, jailed for over 2 years

Posted on August 30, 2012 by Douglas Powell

WLS reports a woman who formerly worked as food inspector for the city of Chicago was sentenced to more than two years in prison Wednesday for taking bribes to obtain food safety certificates for people who had not taken required courses or passed tests.

U.S. District Judge Harry Leinenweber sentenced Mary Anne Koll to 2 1/2 years in federal prison on Wednesday, according to the U.S. Attorney’s office. She will begin her sentence on Dec. 31.

The 69-year-old Burr Ridge resident was convicted last year of conspiracy to commit bribery for accepting at least $96,930 in return for fraudulently arranging to provide bogus certificates for at least 531 people, federal prosecutors charged.

Koll, an independent contractor working as a food inspector for the Chicago Public Health Department, taught state-mandated food sanitation courses and administered exams to people seeking certification between 1995 and 2007, the Dept. of Justice said. The course required 15 hours of training on food safety and sanitation, and state law required all food service establishments to have at least one certified manager on site.

Between June 2004 and June 2007, Koll fraudulently obtained certificates for people who had not attended the course or passed the exam, prosecutors said. Koll, who has since retired, got the certificates by completing the forms herself and submitting them to the IDPH.

But will training change anything? California slaughterhouse reopens with promise of new training

Posted on August 28, 2012 by Douglas Powell

A California slaughterhouse that was shut down last week amid wide-ranging allegations of animal abuse reopened for business Monday, with federal officials saying that employees will receive new training on the handling of electric cattle prods, stun guns and other devices.

But does training actually work? Or is the culture of the workplace more important to continuous reinforcement and desired results (like not abusing animals).

The company also said more frequent third-party audits of its operations, would "establish a new industry standard for the handling of animals."

Third-party audits can sorta suck.

Culture encompasses the shared values, mores, customary practices, inherited traditions, and prevailing habits of communities.

Frank Yiannas, the vice-president of food safety at Wal-Mart wrote in his aptly named 2009 book, Food Safety Culture: Creating a Behavior-based Food Safety Management System, that an organization’s food safety systems need to be an integral part of its culture, and that culture is patterned ways of thought and behaviors that characterize a social group which can be learned through socialization processes and persist through time.

Yiannas also writes:

• The goal of the food safety professional should be to create a food safety
culture – not a food safety program.
• An organization’s culture will influence how individuals within the group
think about food safety, their attitudes toward food safety, their willingness
to openly discuss concerns and share differing opinions, and, in general, the
emphasis that they place on food safety.
• When it comes to creating, strengthening, or sustaining a food safety culture
within an organization, there is one group of individuals who really own it –
they’re the leaders.
• Having a strong food safety culture is a choice. The leaders of an organization
should proactively choose to have a strong food safety culture because
it’s the right thing to do, as opposed to reacting to a significant issue or
outbreak.
• Creating or strengthening a food safety culture will require the intentional
commitment and hard work by leaders at all levels of the organization,
starting at the top.
• Although no two great food safety cultures will be identical, they are likely to
have many similar attributes.
• Identifying food safety best practices can be useful, but one major drawback
to creating such a list is that it doesn’t really demonstrate how these activities
are linked together or interrelated. It misses the big picture – the system.
• To create a food safety culture, you need to have a system.

Training proposed for workers at restaurants that violate food-safety regulations in Ottawa

Posted on August 15, 2012 by Douglas Powell

Food handlers should receive training if their restaurants and businesses repeatedly violate food-safety regulations, says a proposal to go to Ottawa’s board of health.

Except there’s little to no evidence that training works to improve food safety behavior (some call it culture) and little evidence about what makes training effective.

The Ottawa Citizen reports that restaurants and other food premises that have more than four repeat critical infractions over a 12-month period would have to participate in training, according to the proposal from public health staff.

The targeted training would supplement punishment applied to places that break the rules, which can range from fines to closures. (The city also posts the results of inspections on its website, meaning restaurants that violate regulations face the threat of lost business.)

The public health unit currently offers voluntary courses and certification in food-handler training. Staff looked into the possibility of mandatory training for all food handlers, but found it wouldn’t be a worthwhile use of resources.

It’s difficult to evaluate the effectiveness of mandatory certification from other Ontario health units, the report states, and making such requirements mandatory is unwarranted for low-risk establishments such as variety stores.

The board of health is to discuss the proposal on Monday.

Inspection results can be found at ottawa.ca/restaurantinspections.

I’m all for providing compelling information so there’s fewer sick people from food. But the days of plopping butts in a classroom are long gone. We’ll have much more to say about the effectiveness of food service training in the near future.

ServSafe certifies 5 million; no evidence it works

Posted on July 25, 2012 by Douglas Powell

About 10 years ago, eldest daughter Madelynn got a job at a local supermarket.

I asked her if she got any food safety training.

“Yeah, we watched a video for 20 minutes, but we all forget that.”

If the daughter of a food safety nerd had such contempt for food safety training, I thought, maybe we should look at what works and what doesn’t.

We’ve reviewed various training packages over the years, and have a paper about a specific training approach coming out, but haven’t done the kind of observational research I’d like to. No one has.

But that doesn’t stop groups from trumpeting the glories of training.

The U.S. National Restaurant Association has offered the food safety training program, ServSafe, for almost 40 years and has now certified 5 million people.

I say some training is better than none, if only for introducing awareness that food safety is an issue. To coach a travel team in little girls’ ice hockey requires 32 or so hours of training; most people serve food with none.

But the more important question is what training or information works and what doesn’t. And collecting meaningful evidence to verify claims.

Was your edumacation of any use? Public health survey for aspiring PhD

Posted on June 5, 2012 by Douglas Powell

Evan wants to know if health types investigating outbreaks of foodborne illness – or, as it’s initially described, a lot of people barfing, go figure out why – have any training. And if so, what kind of training was offered and whether it was any good.

Evan Henke, a PhD student at the University of Minnesota (right, pretty much as shown) wants to know this info to be able to summarize the typical training and work experiences of public health disaster responders in the U.S.

And get his PhD.

Evan writes, “To build the evidence base of determinants of health department performance, The University of Minnesota has developed an online survey for state and local epidemiologists and environmental health professionals involved in foodborne disease outbreak response in the U.S.

“The Institute of Medicine has long recognized the need to describe the organizational and environmental determinants of public health department performance. This need is intensified in programs related to public health emergency preparedness and response, where public health activities are critical to the mitigation of and recovery from disasters.

“Foodborne disease outbreaks are regularly recurring disasters requiring public health action including laboratory testing, epidemiological investigation, environmental inspection, and regulatory product traceback.

“Several determinants of public health performance for these activities have been proposed. In focus groups conducted in 2010 by the University of Minnesota, state and local foodborne disease responders identified predictors of performance including the following:

-Size of Jurisdiction
-Disease Reporting Laws
-Program Budget
-Organizational Structure
-Surveillance Processes
-Staff Training
-Staff Experience in Similar Disaster Response
-Inter-Professional Relationships and More

“If you are an epidemiologist or environmental health professional, please consider reviewing the survey consent and participating at the link below. The survey will require 15-20 minutes.”

https://live.datstat.com/DCSS-Collector/Survey.ashx?Name=FOBOS_Survey_1

This survey has been approved by The University of Minnesota Institutional Review Board (Study 1110E05746). If you have questions about the survey, please contact Evan Henke, PhD candidate at The University of Minnesota, at henk0071@umn.edu.

I want to buy food from a market vendor who worries about killing their customers

Posted on February 9, 2012 by Ben Chapman

When I was in high school, nerding it up with some other high school kids at the obviously-exciting annual Ontario Model Parliament simulation, I met Hilary Weston. She was the Lieutenant-Governor of Ontario (that’s in Canada) and she and Galen, her husband, owned a bunch of huge food businesses including Weston Foods (Canada’s largest bakery) and most of food retailer Loblaws.

When I met her I told her I liked her bread.

Hilary and Galen’s son Galen Jr, who runs Loblaws now, has pissed some people off in the past couple of days with his (now retracted) comments that farmers’ markets are going to kill people.

I want to buy food from someone who is worried about killing people – not someone who says we we’ve never had a problem. I figure that if they worry about the consequences, they might actually do something about it.

Over the past couple of years one of my graduate students, Allison Smathers, has been working with farmers’ markets in North Carolina to develop and evaluate food safety workshops for market vendors and managers. Market managers, vendors and organizers have been part of the process from the start. But creating and delivering this training doesn’t mean that practices are impacted. Recognizing the need to measure behavior change (and the limitations of relying on self-reported tests), Allison has enlisted the help of a group of secret shoppers who have collected data on current practices and facilities and provided insight into specific areas to focus on. Stuff the shoppers saw, like improper handwashing, cross-contaminating samples and not monitoring temperatures have been the big focus.

Right now Allison and I are in Lincolnton, NC delivering the material to a bunch of extension agents who will be training market folks soon. The secret shoppers will be back out this summer looking again for food safety practices at markets where vendors and managers have been trained – something Allison can compare to what was seen in previous summers. 2010 data was presented at the 2011 IFT annual meeting (abstract below, poster here).

At the end of the project we’ll be able to either show some changes – or not – regardless we’ll know how well the training worked and what to work on in the next iteration.

Seems like a much better approach than "trust us."

Smathers, A., Chapman, B and Phister, T.

Evaluation of facilities and food safety practices in the North Carolina farmers market sector.

IFT Annual Meeting (June 12, 2011)

The association between produce and ready-to-eat foods with foodborne illness prompts concern in the North Carolina farmers’ market sector. Since large amounts of produce are sold at farmers’ markets, there is an increased need to protect the farmers’ market sector from foodborne illness. Considering this potential, we designed a method of assessment to measure the food safety culture and awareness of farmers’ market vendors. The objective of this study was to observe the practices carried out at a farmers’ market in order to assess the need for food safety training and information directed specifically toward the promotion of good food safety practices at farmers’ markets. The study used 20 secret shoppers, trained to observe and collect quantitative and qualitative data through observational surveys. During the 2010 market season, secret shoppers provided information that was neither incriminating nor praiseworthy from 37 farmers’ markets and 168 farmers’ market vendors, representing a large sample of North Carolina markets. The information was provided through observational surveys and results were estimated through analysis of survey data. The survey data was used to create trends and relationships to assess the food safety knowledge and practices carried out at a farmers’ market. Our findings highlight the need for food safety improvement in areas such as cross-contamination, hygiene, sanitation, sampling, claims, and storage. Results provide a need for enhancement of food safety at the farmers’ markets in order to protect the farmers’ market sector from being linked to foodborne illness outbreaks. The overall goal of supporting the growth and health of the North Carolina farmers’ markets will continue to be supported through further assessment and education development.

Food safety culture is more than just training

Posted on February 9, 2012 by Ben Chapman

Most of the stuff I’ve worked on in the past ten years has something to do with evaluating and supporting food safety culture. bites, barfblog, infosheets and reality-based research are all about providing information to make risk-based decisions and assessing where there might be gaps.
The ultimate goal is less sick people.

But as one of my mentors Gord Surgeoner once told me, businesses wont pay attention to food safety unless it generates revenue or some how keeps them from losing money. Making people sick is bad business. So is spending money on training programs or handwashing signs if there isn’t a measurable return on investment.

I’ve been to lots of talks where smart food safety folks were supposed to present about their food safety culture, but really have only shared their training program requirements. And while maybe they are measuring it, no one talks about their return on investment.

In a paper published in 2011, Doug, Casey Jacob and I wrote:

Maintaining a food safety culture means that operators and staff know the risks associated with the products or meals they produce, know why managing the risks is important, and effectively manage those risks in a demonstrable way. In an organization with a good food safety culture, individuals are expected to enact practices that represent the shared value system and point out where others may fail.
Training is part of it. So is having some sort of verification that staff and supervisors are actually reducing risks. It’s pretty easy to point to a poor food safety culture – it’s more difficult to define a good one. But one of the indicators is the "dude wash your hands factor" – pointing out where others fail and modeling the right practice.

Conagra, one of the biggest food companies in North America, and source of a few foodborne illness outbreaks in the past few years, is trying to step up their internal assessment of food safety culture, and sharing it publicly.

In the January 2012 issue of Food Technology, the ConAgra food safety crew shared their approach to assessing their food safety culture (at least the self reported values part) and how they used the results to change the way they train and support good practices in their plants.

Administering a survey to all plant personnel—line workers as well as supervisors and management—is the first step in the assessment process. Having all employees take part in the survey is important, as it sets the stage for communicating that everyone contributes to the plant’s food safety culture and that food safety is everyone’s responsibility. The act itself of taking the survey increases awareness of the concept of food safety culture, gets people talking about food safety culture, and ultimately drives toward improvements.

Their main findings support the approach we use with much of our work – tell people about consequences (both positive and negative), help staff learn from past mistakes and appreciate a community with shared values:

1. Employee desire
• Both employees and leaders want food safety held up as an equal to personal safety, with both groups talking about the need to inspire employees around food safety.
• Participants said they specifically wanted to know more about lessons learned from food safety issues and incidents and how they would prevent future problems.
2. Teamwork
• Employees want to be able to rely on one another.
• Employees felt that there needs to be a good balance of supervisor responsibility and their own responsibility, but felt that at the end of the day, they are personally accountable.
3. Recognition
• Employees were proud of the plant’s food safety performance and understood that it deserved recognition. Recognition breeds motivation.
• Suggestions were made to reinstitute food safety and recognition committees to help drive engagement from the floor.

Great stuff, especially the recognition that surveys and focus groups are just the start (people tend to lie), I hope Conagra continues on this path, publishes this stuff in a peer-reviewed journal, shares some of their further assessments and market it to their customers
It would also be nice for others to know what ConAgra’s return on investment for food safety culture is.

barfblog

safe food from farm to fork

Tag Archives: Training