Don’t Underestimate the Importance of Employee Health as we head into the Winter Months
Early this month, I ran across an article discussing an outbreak investigation in the Australian Capital Territory. The outbreak caused more than 200 people to fall ill and was one of the most widespread outbreak investigations in the history of the territory. The cause was traced back to Norovirus, a virus I am sure you have heard us opine about in this blog before.
The surprising thing was not the virus or the amount of people that fell ill, but the food involved was donuts, something we wouldn’t not necessarily think of as a potentially hazardous food. The source of the outbreak was believed to be an infected foodhandler who did not practice good personal hygiene and likely was not following proper procedures.
This case serves as an excellent reminder to us all, especially as we head into the winter months and a time when illnesses are expected to be at an all-time high this winter with the tripledemic that experts have been warning about. These illnesses, coupled with the already short supply of workers that many of us are facing make the temptation to allow workers who may not be feeling the opportunity to work their normal shift.
Be sure to communicate to your employees the importance of following these protocols and that it not only keeps their peers safe, but their customers and the business, too.
As demonstrated by the Australian example, allowing employees to work who are ill or not feeling their best can have negative consequences for your business. No one died because of the contaminated donut they consumed, but of the 200-plus people who fell ill, two people were hospitalized. The financial impact to the business was not disclosed, but I am guessing it will be quite substantial.
Late last month in our blog, we discussed when to exclude or restrict employees from working in your establishment and I provided some resources that would help you decide when to exclude or restrict, but we didn’t really talk too much about symptoms that someone might exhibit. In short, if an employee is vomiting or has diarrhea, let them stay home and closely follow health code recommendations on how long to restrict the employee (hint, see last month’s blog for specific information on excluding and restricting). If the employee has a sore throat and fever, at the minimum they should be restricted, unless they are serving a highly susceptible population such as a nursing home, in which case they should be excluded.
As a manager, if at all possible, I always tried to side with letting the employee stay home until they were feeling better. While this is easier said than done, I feared that the employee would come into work with an illness and it would quickly spread to other employees, thus creating a bigger issue than simply letting one employee stay home for a day or two.
It is also important to remember preventative approaches that you could use to mitigate risks of illness altogether.
- Encourage employees to get their flu and COVID vaccines, if they are comfortable doing so. Both vaccines are readily available and inexpensive.
- Clearly communicate to your employees the importance of reporting symptoms of illness to the management team. Remember, some of these illnesses pertain to members of the employee’s household, too, not just the employee.
- Be sure your organizational culture supports those who communicate illnesses. Don’t make the employee feel guilty for abandoning their position on a day they are ill. Perhaps the impacts of this guilt have been minimized in our post-COVID world, but employees tend to hold each other accountable in ways some of us might not think about.
Be sure to communicate to your employees the importance of following these protocols and that it not only keeps their peers safe, but their customers and the business, too. Doing so will ensure that everyone stays healthy and are truly able to enjoy the holiday season.
Don’t forget to check out our most recent SafeBites Webinar, “A Foodservice Operators’ Guide to the Food Code”, which will be posted in early December! If you have any topics you’d like here addressed in 2023 during the SafeBites Webinars, please reach out and let me know. Risk Nothing.
Foodborne Illness Myths & Facts
“It must have been something I ate.” That’s the typical statement when a person develops some relatively minor symptoms from food. Maybe not severe enough to go to the doctor so you choose to tough it out without medical care. Sudden onset of flu-like symptoms such as onset of stomach cramps, diarrhea, vomiting and fever could possibly mean you are the victim of a foodborne illness. The illness is sometimes referred to as “food poisoning”, but it’s often misdiagnosed.
Don’t Compromise: Clean and Sanitize
The subject is cleaning and sanitizing. Chefs, food service directors, managers and staff try to practice safe food-handling at every turn in the kitchen. Don’t let that effort go down the drain by slacking off on the many aspects of sanitation. That includes dish and ware-washing techniques (pots, pans, equipment), and cleaning all the areas that give us that “neat as a pin” appearance in your customers eyes. Customers seldom fail to bring that soiled silverware or glass with lipstick on it to the attention of the manager or wait staff. Improperly cleaning and sanitizing of food contact equipment does allow transmission of pathogenic microorganisms to food and ultimately our customer.
The Route to Safer Fresh Fruits and Vegetables
Although fruits and vegetables are one of the healthiest foods sources in our diet, we continue to have foodborne disease outbreaks of significance from produce, sometimes affecting large groups of people in multiple states because of their wide distribution. The CDC estimates that fresh produce now causes a huge number of foodborne illness outbreaks in the United States. Produce needs our continued food safety efforts at the restaurant level as well as at the stages in agricultural production. Occasionally, fresh fruits and vegetables can become contaminated with harmful bacteria or viruses, such as Salmonella, E. coli 0157:H7, Norovirus, and Hepatitis A. This contamination can occur at any point from the field to our table. If eaten, contaminated fruits and vegetables can cause foodborne illness.
Be Cool, Chill Out, Refrigerate Promptly!
The Cold Chain -- Keeping perishable foods at proper cold holding temperatures (between 28°F and 41°F maximum or 0°F for frozen food) from your food producers / manufacturers to your customers has to be one of our strongest links to safe food and high quality. Sometimes that is referred to in the food industry as “maintaining the COLD CHAIN”. Any slip ups in the cold chain, and we have a weak link. Most all of our state food regulations require 41°F as a cold maximum, but colder is a “best practice” policy to maintain.
