The Fort Wayne-Allen County Board of Health heard Monday night about an ordinance in the works to change the way the Fort Wayne-Allen County Department of Health grades restaurants. The proposed ordinance would score eating establishments with a system similar to the letter grades used in the hotel and lodging ordinance. After the number of complaints heard over recent months about eating establishments, Mindy Waldron, health department administrator, said the department was approached by a number of government officials and others who thought it might be a good idea. What the officials didn’t know was the ordinance was already in process. Waldron explained Monday evening what the department has in mind for the proposed ordinance and asked the board for approval to move forward with it. The department plans to get input from the local food establishments. Department staff have been looking at several different models of rating systems that are in place across the country, and last summer they had an intern who specifically focused on researching this topic. The current system in Indiana is based on critical violations, non-critical violations and swing violations, which could go either way depending upon how serious they are. This is very difficult to fit into a point system, explained Ann Applegate, director of the health department’s food and consumer protection division.

So now they would like to take it to a risk-based inspection. They have created a risk matrix by looking at all the violations they have and looked to see if they contribute to what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention calls the five food-borne illness risk factors and what significance those factors have when inspectors see them during a food inspection as violations. Applegate said the current code will be getting revisions over the next year to see if the new system can fit into a risk-based model instead of a code-based model. Under the current model inspectors give a number of critical, non-critical and swing violations, and people might really not understand the significance of those violations. By going to an A-D system it would immediately let the public know what kind of an establishment it is. Just like with the hotel and lodging ordinance that was put in place earlier this year, which gives businesses an A-F rating, the establishment could correct any problems and then the inspectors return for a chance to raise the letter grade. The board of health liked the idea and the heath department will be moving ahead on with the development.

In other businesses

Waldron briefly discussed the health department’s decision to not draft a new ordinance for regulating massage parlors and instead will consult as requested by other departments on a case-by-case basis as problems occur. Dr. Deborah McMahan, health commissioner, also gave a summery to the board of why it is important to work on a children’s health Improvement plan. She gave a presentation that outlined many of the problems children in Allen County and Indiana face, including the number of single-parent households and lack of accessible health care, food, housing and education. McMahan said it would take the whole community to make a plan like this work. “We can’t do it alone.” In brief McMahan said what they hope to do is have a plan with six domains: physical health, mental health, spiritual health, education, social health and justice. Each domain would look at its area, assess it, evaluate where things stand in Allen County with respect to its domain and then the whole group will go through the process of examining Allen County’s assets. McMahan will continue the planning and update the board at a future meeting. The idea is to find a way to provide a coordinated level of care to make it easier to assess, navigate and connect children and families in Allen County with the services they need to build a healthy, productive future for all children.

Source: www.news-sentinel.com