Rural Area Food Training and Safety (rafts)

PROJECT SUMMARYRural Area Food Training and Safety (RAFTS) Summary:The Franklin Regional Council of Governments (FRCOG) and the Franklin County CooperativePublic Health Service (CPHS) propose RAFTS as a 5-year project to develop and implement astrategic plan that will address the systemic problems associated with food safety in ruraljurisdictions in Franklin County as well as most of Western Massachusetts. The FRCOG/CPHSis applying for FDA funding to enable a rural regional health department to take steps to betterprotect its population by achieving greater conformance with the Retail Program Standards.Massachusetts is the seventh smallest state in the nation, but has the highest number of localhealth departments - 351. This leads to great fragmentation and a lower standard of publichealth protections than in much of the rest of the nation.The participating towns, which have all enrolled in the Program Standards, propose to build asystem for improved workforce training of food handlers and food inspectors, standardizationand increased enforcement uniformity, and improved industry communication and relations. Thelack of FDA standardized inspectors across the region results in inconsistency in inspections,imprecise code application, and non-uniform compliance efforts.There is currently not any publicly accessible information about food inspection results orcompliance status for retail food establishments in rural jurisdictions. An outcome of this projectwill be a regional system that tracks permit status, inspection results, and compliance historywhich is capable of producing reports that can then be shared with industry and the public.Increasing the public's access to food safety information will be a significant improvement andshould lead to greater consumer confidence in the food safety program, and should help toprioritize funding for this essential public health service.The VNRFRPS will be used as the framework for the creation of the RAFTS program. Theimprovements in rural regional retail food safety will be a great step forward for public health inMassachusetts, and will provide a model for cross-jurisdictional sharing on food safety.