Report
to/Rapport au :
Ottawa Board of Health
Conseil de santé d’Ottawa
Monday, August, 15 2011/le
lundi 15 aout, 2011
Dr./Dr Isra Levy,
Medical Officer of Health/Médecin
chef en santé publique
Contact Person/Personne-ressource :
Siobhan Kearns, Manager/Gestionnaire
Environment, Health Protection and Outbreak Management
Branch/
Environnement, Protection de
la santé et Gesion des éclosions
Ottawa
Public Health/Santé publique Ottawa
613-580-2424, ext./poste 23483, Siobhan.Kearns@ottawa.ca
|
ACS2011-OPH-EHPOM-0001 |
|
SUBJECT: |
|
OBJET : |
MISE À JOUR
CONCERNANT LA STRATÉGIE DE SALUBRITÉ DES ALIMENTS DE SANTÉ PUBLIQUE OTTAWA |
That the Board of
Health for the City of Ottawa Health Unit:
1.
Receive
this report for information;
2.
Direct
staff to forward this report to the Ministry of Health and Long Term Care as
required; and
3.
Direct
staff to bring forward a report on mandatory food handler safety training by
the first quarter of 2012.
Que le Conseil de
santé de la circonscription sanitaire de la ville d’Ottawa :
1.
prenne connaissance du
présent rapport;
2.
demande au personnel de
transmettre le présent rapport au ministère de la Santé et des Soins de longue
durée suivant les besoins;
3.
ordonne au personnel de
présenter un rapport sur la formation obligatoire des préposés à la
manipulation des aliments au plus tard le premier trimestre de 2012.
In
2007, the Office of the Auditor General at the City of Ottawa conducted an
audit of Ottawa Public Health’s (OPH) Food Safety Program. The audit, which
included a number of recommendations for improving the Food Safety Program, was
approved by City Council on August 28, 2008 (ACS2008-CCS-CPS-0024). In response
to the Auditor General’s recommendations, a Food Safety Strategy was developed
and a report outlining the strategy was presented to Community and Protective
Services Committee and City Council April 2009 (ACS2009-COS-OPH-0002). In 2010,
a Food Safety Program Update report was submitted to the Community and
Protective Services Committee (ACS2010-COS-OPH-0003), illustrating that OPH’s
Food Safety Program had implemented all of the recommendations made by the
Auditor while also facing challenges such as the response to H1N1, OC Transpo
bus strike, floods and five large-scale food recalls.
This
report serves to inform the Board of Health on OPH’s Food Safety Strategy and fulfills
the Auditor General’s recommendation that OPH monitor and report regularly on
meaningful trends or indicators of the Food Safety Program’s successes and
results achieved.
Progress to Date
The Food Safety team
has completed all the objectives of the previous Food Safety Strategic report:
ü Meeting
targeted provincial requirements for food safety inspections;
ü Continuing
to increase visibility and enrolment in the food handler training course;
ü Expanding
the quality assurance process to include more measurable results and a
continued process to standardize the approach for quality improvement; and
ü Supporting
the development of staff to increase service excellence while building
competencies within the profession.
OPH’s Food
Safety Strategic plan aims to
improve the operational performance of the Food Safety Program by building
staff capacity, improving inspection consistency and efficiency, as well as
increasing information exchange in all areas of the program.
OPH’s Food Safety team
includes 28 Public Health Inspectors (PHIs), who are able to service Ottawa’s
multi-lingual population. The team, which is 50% officially bilingual, provides
three main services including:
1. Food Safety Enforcement/Inspection (24 PHIs)
2. Food Safety Intake/mitigation (1 PHI)
3. Food Safety Education (3 PHIs)
Required inspections
of food premises are conducted in accordance with the Ministry of Health and
Long-term Care’s (MOHLTC) mandate to assess the risk level of premises and
inspect those with higher risk more frequently. Establishments are categorized
into one of three risk groups:
·
High-risk premises, which serve
perishable foods that involve multiple preparation steps or cater primarily to
groups at risk for serious food-borne illness, including full service
restaurants and long-term-care facilities;
·
Medium-risk premises, which serve perishable foods with minimal
preparation steps and cater primarily to
a general clientele, including fast-food outlets and;
·
Low-risk food premises, which prepares
and/or serves non-hazardous foods with a lesser degree of handling to a smaller
volume of patrons, such as variety stores.
According to the
provincial requirements, all low-risk premises must be inspected once per year,
medium-risk premises twice per year, and high-risk premises three times per
year.
In 2010, every high-risk food premise in Ottawa received at
least one inspection. Taking all risk categories (high, medium, low) into
consideration, OPH achieved 93% of the 10,422 required inspections in 5,064 establishments.
The outstanding 7%
encompasses premises that remained uninspected for the year including 121
medium- and 188 low- risk.
Table
1: Completion Rates by
Risk Rating
|
|
Number of High Risk Premises |
Number of Medium Risk Premises |
Number of Low Risk Premises |
|
Number of premises |
1,611 |
2,136 |
1,317 |
|
Number of mandated inspections |
4,833 |
4,272 |
1,317 |
|
Number of inspections completed |
4,562 |
3,919 |
1,227 |
|
Completion rate |
94.4% |
91.7% |
93.2% |
Ottawa’s food industry is in a continuous state of flux. Due
to variations or delays in operations of new or seasonal high, medium-risk and
low-risk food premises, an impact to the mandated number of inspections may
result. For example, some high risk
premises like restaurants may open or close half way through the year or are
seasonal in nature. Therefore, OPH staff are not able to inspect the premises
three times as required. This impact has the ability to adversely skew
statistical results. It should also be noted that due to ongoing improvements
to report and system generated statistics, completion rates will improve with
the removal of redundancies in data extraction.
For
the year 2011, OPH has procured two new
funded student PHI positions to help with work load and surge capacity, and
existing staff will become proficient with newly implemented information
technology.
Supplementary
to routine inspections, OPH conducted an additional 2,200 inspections to
address complaints, potential incidences of food borne illness, special events
and pre-opening inspections in a timely manner. Inspectors prioritized
according to risk thereby minimizing the number of high risk premises that were
left uninspected.
In addition to compliance
inspections, PHIs are tasked with re-inspections, as well as investigating consumer
complaints, food-borne illness and special events. Re-inspections address food
premises that do not meet all the compliance criteria for an initial inspection,
and thus require subsequent surveillance. Complaint inspections are generally
related to concerns raised by the public. Food borne illness inspections
investigate specific instances of food borne disease, 100% of which were addressed.
Finally, PHIs also to inspect food establishments at a large number of special
events including Canada Day, Blues Fest, Tulip Festival, Jazz Fest, and
Winterlude.
Table 2: Inspections 2007-2010
|
|
2007 |
2008 |
2009 |
2010 |
|
Compliance Inspections |
9,826 |
9,744 |
4,794 |
9,708 |
|
Re-inspections |
1,953 |
1,922 |
2,166 |
2,708 |
|
Consumer Complaint Investigations |
524 |
500 |
572 |
520 |
|
Food-borne Illness Investigations |
86 |
77 |
133 |
184 |
|
Special Event Inspections |
|
|
610 |
1,100 |
|
Total Inspections |
12, 389 |
12,243 |
8,275 |
14,220 |
Online inspection reports
In June 2009, the
Food Safety team implemented an online system to enable the public to view all
food premises’ inspection reports - as recommended by the auditor and Ontario Public Health Standards (OPHS).
In 2010, there were 403,198 hits to the city’s online inspection disclosure
website, www.ottawa.ca/restaurantinspections– with an average of 1,104 hits per day. OPH
recognizes the interest in the website and has since initiated further
promotional campaigns and IT collaboration to improve accessibility of the
information.
Food product recalls
In 2010, PHIs
investigated one food recall, which involved conducting effectiveness checks in
279 food premises to ensure the product was removed.
Since 2009, several
quality assurance initiatives have been implemented. These include increased staffing at the
supervisory level, increased supervision of inspectors during field visits,
rotating staff among districts, monitoring the results of inspections for
consistency, getting feedback from clients, having monthly staff meetings, and
creating a new manual for food service establishments. The Food Safety Program initiated
supervisory positions to revise policies and procedures, upgrade staff training
and assist with implementation of a new Environmental Health Information System
(EHIS).
In 2010, OPH intake
line received approximately 1,030 calls related to food safety. PHIs
investigated each of the complaints and for those calls that could not be immediately
resolved, arrangements were made for the client to be contacted by the
appropriately specialised PHI. The
investigation process included collaboration with epidemiologists, outbreak
management specialist PHIs and, in some circumstances, community partners.
In 2010, the Outbreak
Management team investigated six reports of food borne illness outbreaks
associated with Ottawa restaurants. In addition, there were 80 institutional enteric
outbreaks and 184 food borne illness complaints that were investigated by food
safety PHIs.
3.
Food Safety Education
OPH provides a food
handlers training program for operators at Ottawa food premises. To reflect the
linguistic diversity of the city, food handler courses are offered in English,
French and Cantonese. Due to popular demand,
class schedules have expanded to include week nights, weekends and for those
who prefer web learning, online e-courses through a partner company In Good
Hands at www.ingoodhands.ca.
The class schedule is advertised on Ottawa.ca/health and through OPH’s Twitter
account. Course enrolment continues to increase annually, demonstrating
Ottawa’s growing interest in learning safe food handling practices. The course
was attended by 1830 people in 2010 and the education team certified 1435 food
handlers, a record number for OPH. The
table below shows the trends in food handler certification. Both enrolment and the number of certificates
issued have increased by 44% since 2008.
Further, a new education manual has been developed, which will be available in the three most prevalent languages in Ottawa: English, French and Cantonese. New sections have been tailored to the changing nature of food industry techniques and new products as well the manual features a section dedicated to emergency situations. The new manual also provides OPH food handler instructors the opportunity to adapt the content of the course to local demand. These changes were implemented to provide students a more relevant and interactive learning tool, thereby engaging food handlers and increasing information uptake.
Table 3: Registrants
for food handler training (2008 – 2010)
|
|
2008 |
2009 |
2010 |
|
Enrolment |
1,268 |
1,435 |
1,830 |
|
Certificates Issued |
996 |
1,237 |
1,435 |
|
Increase in Enrolment from Previous
Year |
|
13% |
22% |
DISCUSSION
Exploration of mandatory food handler
training
Currently 8 of 36
Ontario health units have begun mandatory food handler certification, whereby
all food premises are, at minimum, required to have at least one certified food
handler working at all times. While the effectiveness of mandatory food handler
training remains a controversial topic, the Food Safety team continues to
explore the value of pursuing a bylaw and will bring forward a report on the
subject in the first quarter of 2012.
There are no legal implications related to the first recommendation in this report and there are no legal impediments to implementing the second and third recommendations in this report.
FINANCIAL
IMPLICATIONS
There are no financial implications with the approval of the recommendations contained in this report.
Ottawa
Public Health will use this report to further engage community partners,
policy-makers and Ottawa residents in developing and informing OPH’s
Food Safety Strategy.