People buying food or eating out in Clay County, Missouri, can have confidence vendors are meeting the highest standard of food safety.
Clay County Public Health Center is one of nine nationwide to receive the Food and Drug Administration’s certification for upholding standards that include a comprehensive training program, consistency with national inspection criteria, community relations and emergency response, among others. Overall, the goal is to reduce factors that lead to foodborne illness.
The county’s environmental health program is made up of nine employees and the section chief overseeing 745 food establishments. They carry out regular and complaint-based inspections, train food handlers and managers and assist facilities with anything else that might be pertinent to protect the public from foodborne illness.
They also provide oversight for septic systems, pools and spas, hotels and mosquito concerns.
Leah Ferris, the program manager for environmental health at the health center, said it’s a thankless job being an inspector ensuring food safety compliance or reviewing codes in hotels and spas. Often it is one where they are labeled as bad guys for slapping violations on businesses not meeting code, but an accomplishment like this shows they can be good guys too.
“We really are trying to be educators more than regulators, so we're out there trying to help the stores,” Ferris said. “We want everyone to succeed in our county and we want everyone to get safe food regardless of what it is.”
The most common code violations in Clay County occur around storing food in the cold, making sure food employees have the right certifications, marking dates foods were bought and should be used by, making sure the right chemicals are used to clean, and the cleanliness of surfaces and utensils.
“What it's showing is the fact that less people are getting sick,” Ferris said of the FDA certification. “We're seeing less of these violations that are going to get people sick when we're out in the field.”
The process for certification has taken a decade, during which the department worked to address risk areas and reduce factors leading to foodborne illness.
Ferris said there were also internal improvements made to meet the criteria, such as balancing workload based on how many inspectors they had on staff.
Each criterion for the certification isn’t measured by a minimum but instead represents a high benchmark “to which all regulatory retail food programs should aspire,” said Kimberly Destromp, acting office director of FDA’s Office of Retail Food Protection.
“Active participation in this program clearly demonstrates a remarkable level of commitment to achieving program excellence,” Destromp said.
Of the 3,300 environmental health programs in the country, 980 are enrolled in FDA Retail Food Program Standards, working toward the same goal as Clay County.
Jackson, Platte, Cass and Johnson counties in Missouri, as well as the City of Independence, are enrolled but did not meet all the high standards in their most recent audit. The Kansas City, Missouri Health Department met the criteria in 2014 but did not in their most recent self-assessment in 2019.
The Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services is enrolled but did not meet all nine standards. In Kansas, only the Department of Agriculture is enrolled and it does meet all nine of the standards.
Every five years, staffers in Clay County's environmental program will conduct an audit to hold themselves accountable and ensure they are still meeting all nine standards.
“We want to be the most effective and responsive environmental health program we can be,” said Clay County Director of Public Health Darrell Meinke. “The work we’ve done to accomplish these standards will have a positive impact on the health of the people in our community for many years to come.”
