Is Your Staff Competent and Survey Ready in Food Safety? Essay Example

Statement of Original Work

I hereby declare that the practicum submission is my own work and to the best of my knowledge it contains no materials previously written or submitted to the School of Public Health by another person, except where acknowledgement is made in the report. I also declare that the intellectual content of this practicum report is the product of my own work, except to the extent that assistance from others in report design and formation, presentation, and linguistic expression is acknowledged.

Abstract

Problem: Food safety is becoming an increasingly important concern. People are worried about potential health risks related to genetically modified organisms and others are concerned with the contribution of the modern diet to obesity. However, in spite of the many dietary problems that arise in the general setting, it is especially important to ensure that hospital patients are able to maintain correct nutrition. It is therefore essential to determine how this will be the case. The need for food safety in the health care setting could be resolved by implementing the role of food surveyors.

Materials and Methods: To gain an understanding of the role of food surveyors and apply the need for this position to the hospital setting, a book entitled Survey Ready in Food Safety was utilized. Employees were trained to follow the role of food surveyor in the hospital setting. They were asked to fill in logs of the foods served and whether they should be approved for safety reasons.

Results: All of the nutrition logs that all employees were doing were filled accurately. However, it is important to increase the timing aspect of this process and to ensure that the foods prepared and delivered match the individual dietary requirements of the patients.

Introduction and Background

Food safety is an important concern. There are many food products available on the market and often a lack of Food and Drug Administration regulatory requirements that allow the public to understand the nutritional implications of each product. In addition, even though some nutritional labeling requirements are present, there is little understanding pertaining to the implications of how the food is grown and stored. Specifically, people are worried about potential health risks related to genetically modified organisms, the manufacturing process, and storage process. While general nutritional statements are provided for these products, it is challenging for the average individuals to fully understand the health implications of many products.

It is important to consider how the lack of information provided about food contributes to health. This is a greater concern in the hospital setting, in which many individuals are required to be served food that falls under even more stringent regulatory conditions. Overall, understanding these implications are important because it is necessary to defend the health of these individuals. It is therefore essential to determine how food surveyors could reasonably contribute to the health of patients in the hospital setting. These individuals are responsible for monitoring the type of food that is distributed in addition to how it is prepared to ensure that hospital patients are able to receive recommended nutrition and/or diets that are specific to their unique health concerns.

This research study took place at Loma Linda University Medical Center-Murrieta located in Murrieta, California. This was detected as plagiarism by the company. If you would like it included, you must add it back yourself, otherwise I cannot upload the document. I can also edit it if an order is placed for this.

Literature Review

 The literature indicates that there are many nutritional health risks present in the hospital setting. Statistical analyses indicate that between 20 and 50% of hospital patients are malnourished (Rasmussen et al., 2010). In many situations, patients either enter the hospital with an existing nutrition problem. Otherwise, it is developed over time. It is therefore necessary to ensure that designated health professionals are able to understand the scope of this situation and contribute to the development of healthy meals for all patients, taking their individual dietary needs into consideration. A nutrition surveyor could reasonably contribute meaningfully to this need by ensuring an enhanced screening of food throughout this process. Doing so will ensure that the patients at Loma Linda University Medical Center – Murrieta will have access to safer and more nutritious food.

Another important consideration is the factors that contribute towards malnutrition in the hospital. Larger institutions are proportionately less able to account for the health needs of the members of their population (Westergren et al., 2009). In some institutions, nutritional needs falls to the responsibility of the nurse, although these professionals are not explicitly trained in this area. Furthermore, since nurses have many different responsibilities, the amount of time that they are able to spend examining nutrition concerns is limited. It is therefore necessary to designate specialized members of the staff to contribute to nutritional needs in the health care setting. Dieticians can reasonably decide how to supplement the nutritional needs of each patient while determining if the food is prepared in a healthy manner. Since the Loma Linda University Medical Center – Murrieta facility is growing larger, it would be reasonable for them to adopt a permanent food surveyor staff to prevent increasing malnutrition concerns.

Project/Methodology

In this project, the researcher assessed the nutrition department at Loma Linda University Medical Center – Murrieta and aimed to ensure that the department would be ready for inspection with CMS or other inspectors. Furthermore, employees were assessed to determine with what degree of accuracy that were able to complete relevant nutrition logs. All employees recruited to the study were already trained according to institutional standards but were asked to implement the Standards of Care in their daily practices in addition to their regular safety requirements. As a researcher, I supervised this process to ensure that these individuals were following all relevant policies and procedures. The timeframe of the project was approximately one month long. Data was collected primarily by observing lead chefs, the executive chef, and his kitchen staff. Best practices were conveyed to the team in the form of a PowerPoint presentation.

The theoretical framework for this project was based off of a seminar survey in addition to the Ready for Food Safety book provided by my site supervisor. At the end of this project, I conveyed my findings to the management team to improve their health safety practices.

Evaluation/Results/Discussion

The major findings of the study indicated that executive leadership is very important for a department to be at its best. In order to be more prepared for a survey a department needs its leaders for support and follow through. These results can be used by the organization because recommendations and observation from an outsider are relatively unbiased. These suggestions will help improve the department and better allow it to be prepared for inspections.

The findings found that executive leadership should be more involved in the department. However, these results would have been more meaningful if this project were completed over a longer period of time. My recommendations for the department would have executive leadership more involved in the kitchen and with the staff. The lack of leadership in this setting is a result of the uncertainty of the job responsibilities of the workers within the department. There is an unclear understanding of who should serve as the authority figure. As a consequence, the department is currently functioning as an anarchy. Unfortunately, this is not conducive to patient care because a lack of responsible leadership results in a lack of employee motivation in addition to a general sense of disorder. Therefore, the department staff members are not really working together to achieve common goals. While everyone is concerned with patient care, the effort that each individual is putting forth is not organized and therefore lacks efficiency. It would be valuable to reassess the performance of this department after my recommendations have been implemented for several months to determine to what extent improvements haven been made.

References

FDA Food Code. (2013).

Handy, L. (2014). Is Your Staff Competent and Survey ready in food safety? San Diego, California.

Rasmussen HH, Holst M, Kondrup J. (2010). Measuring nutritional risk in hospitals. Clin Epidemiol., 2: 209–216.

Westergren A, Wann-Hansson C, Börgdal EB, Sjölander J, Strömblad R, Klevsgård R, Axelsson C, Lindholm C, Ulander K. (2009). Malnutrition prevalence and precision in nutritional care differed in relation to hospital volume – a cross-sectional survey. Nutrition Journal, 8:20