1. Food Safety in Public Hospitals
The Old Approach
The New Approach
The Wish List
Greg Evans - Food Unit
Environmental Health Directorate
Dept of Health WA
AIFST WA BentleyTechnology Park Annual Conference 2007

2. Food Safety in Public Hospitals
The Old Approach
– Checks of deliveries incl. temperature checks of
incoming foods, ingredients
– Records of Cold Storage temperature checks
Cooking temperatures checked sometimes
– Hot box Bain Marie temperatures checks
– Plate out temperatures checks

3. Food Safety in Public Hospitals
The Old Approach Cont’d
• At time of service to patients temperature checks
• Some records to confirm the system -Use of
procedures and temperature checks undertaken
• Some food hygiene training - in house and external
• Dependant on other staff - Infection Control, Health
Service Manager, LG Environmental Health Officer.

4. Potential problems - food safety risks
• Lack of controls in place for Cool down and
Reheating
• Inspecting officers needed to undertake
temperature checks at times to confirm safety.
• Inspections confirmed safe food handling and safe
temperatures. Not always documented
Food Safety in Public Hospitals

5. Food Safety in Public Hospitals
The New Approach
• New regulatory requirements -Food bill, New Food
safety standards in the Food Standards Code
• Vulnerable populations identified - Public hospitals
one of the sectors
• Food Safety Plans/Programs required
• 90 + Public hospitals

6. Food Safety in Public Hospitals
What challengers are faced by the sector
and the regulator.
• WA is a huge state - time and the distances
• Hence travel costs expensive
• Accommodation costs expensive
• Small staff numbers in sites
• Levels of skills
• Ability to up grade skills /knowledge

7. Food Safety in Public Hospitals
Answer
• Develop an electronic solution or partial solution
• Design Project: Build an Intranet site with step by step
approach to build a FS Plan onsite, with limited outside
advice.
• Trial the site in Hospitals in different region.
• Obtain feedback and modify where possible prior to
allowing access by the sector.
• Simplify and link to other relevant areas
• Ensure it is accessible from every site in WA
• Needs to combine email and telephone contacts to Food
Unit staff to provide advice/assistance on use of site.

8. Food Safety in Public Hospitals
The site guides a FS Plan construction process in 9 major
steps
• Step 1 files required
• Step 2 File labels required.
• Step 3 Administration
• Step 4 Procedures
• Step 5 A Generic flow chart
• Step 6 A Hazard table that identifies hazards in the catering
practices and Monitoring and procedures to use.
• Step 7 The documents needed (procedures and monitoring needed
to control the hazards identified.)
• Step 8 Filing the documents and placing the files in kitchen.
• Step 9 Operating the FS Plan

9. Food Safety in Public Hospitals
• The integrated approach - the advantages
– The site provides consistent application of food safety
across all sites.
– The documents in use ensure staff may move to any
hospital across the state and will not need training or
another orientation when moving to another site.
– The audit system has been built from the same site and
follows the same order as the FS Plan built from the
site (Easier to audit)

10. Food Safety in Public Hospitals
• The integrated approach cont’d
– The database to store audit data can be used to
provide benchmarking across a health region, an area
or between similar size hospitals.
– The database will allow an easy report for health
regulators and senior management to deal succinctly
with issues in a hospital, an area/region or the entire
state.

11. Food Safety in Public Hospitals
The Wish List
AND we end up with:-
– common FS Plans.
– Built with the same template.
– All easily audited with a comprehensive audit
tool/template because the template is very
specific, easy to report and to add audit results to
the database.
– Food handling staff that can operate a FS Plan no
matter what hospital they work in or transfer to.

12. Food Safety in Public Hospitals
• The staff gain skills without the necessity to run
a training program before they access the
Intranet site and proceed to build and set up a
FS Plan in their own facility.
• That the process of building their own FS Plan
became a training/learning experience for all
the team members.
• Allowed training to be more focused when
needed rather than a broad brush overall
approach.

13. Question Time
Food Safety in Public Hospitals