Afdo National Curriculum Standard Development For Integrated Food Safety System Regulators

AFDO Application for RFA-FD-16-042 - PROJECT SUMMARYThe Association of Food and Drug Officials (AFDO) proposes to collaborate with national foodsafety training partners to establish a coordinated effort for expansion and development of theIntegrated Food Safety System (IFSS) National Curriculum Standard (NCS), including continueddevelopment of manufactured food (including Animal Feed, Dairy Processing, Game, Meat andPoultry, Manufactured Food, and Shellfish) competency and curriculum frameworks, furtherdevelopment and validation of manufactured food competency statements, and updates to anddevelopment of manufactured food training courses to meet the needs of manufactured foodregulatory agencies, which is required for a successful, national IFSS. The end goal of thisproposed project is to significantly increase training opportunities for manufactured foodregulatory agencies, leading to long term improvements in the knowledge, skills, and abilities ofregulators as part of an IFSS.AFDO will recruit manufactured food subject matter experts (SMEs) to create a pool of qualifiedinstructors who can assist in the development of the manufactured food curriculum, frameworks,competencies, and courses. AFDO will also assist with the development of train the trainersystems to assure that all SMEs who will deliver United States Food and Drug Administration(FDA) manufactured food courses will first complete instructor skills training (ISTs) anddemonstrate their training capabilities through the satisfactory completion of course specificinstructor training (CSIT) or an audit assessment conducted during the pilot testing of trainingcourses or programs developed.Achieving all project objectives will require extensive cooperation and coordination betweentraining partners. AFDO will build upon its existing broad network of resources, including itscommunity of federal, state, local, territorial, and tribal entities built over more than 120 years ofthe association's existence and experience. The outcomes of this project will be theadvancement of a national IFSS through the establishment of a well-coordinated NCS, anincrease in the number of quality manufactured food courses available to regulators, and anincrease in the number and quality of trained and vetted SME trainers.