This grant proposal is intended to provide a structured program that would assist our organization in developing policies, procedures and practices that enhance the delivery of services to our community. The Cincinnati Health Department (CHD) would like to utilize this grant opportunity to improve the General Environmental Health Division food inspection program. With this grant, CHD will provide funding to a team that will develop and implement training, policy and procedures for identifying foodborne illness risk factors and meet additional criteria in Standards 2,3,4,6 and 9 of the Voluntary National Retail Food Regulatory Program Standards. This will result in the implementation of uniform and standardized procedures for the Cincinnati Health Department's General Environmental Health Division's protocol for food safety inspection. These standards will allow us to implement protocol for standardized knowledge and behavior of food protection staff, (sanitarians) and help reduce the potential for incidences of food borne illnesses. Finally, the pre-standardization and post- standardization training data will be statistically analyzed to make necessary adjustments to our training protocol. The policy/guidance document contains the program description, the work experience requirements, required coursework, field training, and the description for completing a final project that the sanitarians will be required to submit in order to become standardized. The capacity building will focus on the Food Protection program and the impact that standardizing staff will have on the identification of foodborne illness risk factors that cause food borne illness in the community. The partnership of CHD with the University of Cincinnati (UC) will be employed to develop a systematic approach to sanitarian training and statistical analysis of the inspection data. Faculty from the UC Department of Public Health Sciences posses expertise in public health workforce development with specific attention to core competency 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.
