This grant proposal is intended to provide a structured program that would assist ourorganization in developing policies, procedures and practices that enhance the delivery ofservices to our community. The Cincinnati Health Department (CHD) would like toutilize this grant opportunity to improve the General Environmental Health Division foodinspection program. With this grant, CHD will provide funding to a team that willdevelop and implement training, policy and procedures for identifying foodborne illnessrisk factors and meet additional criteria in Standards 2,3,4,6 and 9 of the VoluntaryNational Retail Food Regulatory Program Standards. This will result in theimplementation of uniform and standardized procedures for the Cincinnati HealthDepartment's General Environmental Health Division's protocol for food safetyinspection. These standards will allow us to implement protocol for standardizedknowledge and behavior of food protection staff, (sanitarians) and help reduce thepotential for incidences of food borne illnesses. Finally, the pre-standardization and post-standardization training data will be statistically analyzed to make necessary adjustmentsto our training protocol.The policy/guidance document contains the program description, the work experiencerequirements, required coursework, field training, and the description for completing afinal project that the sanitarians will be required to submit in order to becomestandardized. The capacity building will focus on the Food Protection program and theimpact that standardizing staff will have on the identification of foodborne illness riskfactors that cause food borne illness in the community.The partnership of CHD with the University of Cincinnati (UC) will be employed todevelop a systematic approach to sanitarian training and statistical analysis of theinspection data. Faculty from the UC Department of Public Health Sciences possesexpertise in public health workforce development with specific attention to corecompetency assessments and educational module development for sanitarians.
This grant proposal will provide funding to the Cincinnati Health Department (CHD) to provide training and education to the food protection staff that will bring uniformity and consistency to the CHD food safety inspections for retail food establishments. The data gathered from these inspections will be statistically analyzed for consistency and where adjustments need to be made to improve the program and determine the effectiveness of the program.
