by Legal action lerks with every meal prepared or served away from home.
If a foodservice company or institution agrees with the CDC that handwashing is the #1 intervention to prevent the spread of outbreak-causing pathogens, they should act now to:
- determine their current compliance rates, “Relax or resolve.”
- identify and verbalize the associated risk, “Know thy enemy of success.”
- cross-departmentally agree the operation’s Handwashing Risk Credit Score, “Your Handwashing ‘FICO’ Score.”
Primary responsibility for handwashing clearly lies with owners and local managers of the business – the line of Operations professionals stretching from the boardroom to the C-suite and out to local site leaders. This is true for restaurants, hospitals, nursing homes, food processors, catering companies, school cafeterias, cruise liners, institutions and more.
The intensifying expectations of safe food from consumers, coupled with a steadily improving network of CDC labs to pinpoint outbreak sources and an ever-increasing prosecutorial expertise are raising the value for documented-clean hands.
The implementation of FSMA adds to the interest in overall illness-prevention strategies and best practices.
