Impact of Foodservice Manager Credentialing on Food Safety

Two types of data would be gathered. The first would be gathered by surveying the 50 state (plus Washington, D.C.) health departments with the purpose of determining health departments' opinions about credentialing and develop descriptive baseline information regarding current credentialing practices. The second part of the study would survey foodservice managers at the time of a routine foodservice inspection with the purpose of determining whether there are correlations between manager food safety knowledge, credentialing, and experience and the inspection score. The purpose of the last part of this project would be education and outreach, and would develop (hard copy) reports and a website for health professionals, including a procedural manual regarding credentialing.
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Incidents of foodborne illness in the US have been estimated to be between 6.6 million to 81 million per year, with an estimated 75f the reported incidents due to mishandling in foodservice operations. This study will examine the impact of foodservice manager knowledge, training, and credentialing on food safety.
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The ultimate impact of this project will be to provide the foodservice industry and regulatory agency responsible for food safety in that industry with information to use for determining the best way to use credentialing to improve food safety in the foodservice industry. <p>
There are two approaches that will be used. The first approach is a nation-wide electronic survey of the 50 state-level regulatory agencies plus the District of Columbia would be conducted. As recommended by the Dillman Tailored Design Method (2000), a minimum of four additional contacts would be made by mail, fax, or e-mail in order to encourage the highest response rate. Data will be recorded without identification to maintain anonymity of the respondents. Respondents will be asked if they wish to receive a copy of the results and, if so, to provide their e-mail address, but these e-mail addresses will be set up in a separate database to maintain confidentiality of responses. The second approach to determining the impact of credentialing would be to survey foodservice managers at the time of a routine foodservice inspection done by the health inspector. To conduct this part of the study, participation from eight state health departments will be sought. To ensure as diverse a sampling as possible, the following factors will be considered when asking state health departments to participate: geographic location (north, south, east, west, midwest), population, and manager certification policy. A total of 5,000 surveys would be distributed to ensure that at least 1000 surveys would be returned. The number sent to each participating state would be based on their population, with the larger states receiving more surveys. While the inspector conducts the foodservice inspection, the on-duty manager will be invited to complete the voluntary manager's survey. Once the survey is complete, the manager will seal it in the return envelope and places it in the mail. After receiving surveys and inspection reports at Purdue University, they will be matched by the six-digit code on each survey and report. Inspection scores will be based on the critical and non-critical findings, as defined by the Food and Drug Administration in the 2001 Food Code, Appendix 7. The findings will be coded for analysis in three different ways. The first will be using a traditional inspection form as a guide to weight the numbers so that the results can be compared back to earlier studies. The inspection form that will be used as a guide is the one that was published in the fourth edition of the Applied Foodservice Sanitation, A Certification Coursebook (Education Foundation of the National Restaurant Association, 1995). Next method for encoding the inspection reports will be to encode based on a weighted score like one on the traditional form. The difference being that points will be ducted from 100 for each finding, as opposed to the traditional method of only deduction points once for each classification of findings. The final method will be to weight all critical finds as four points and all non-critical findings as a one point. One additional point will be added for each repeat finding. As before, the total number of points will be subtracted from 100 to calculate the inspection score.