A survey of food hygiene and safety training in the retail and catering industry

Describes a survey of food safety training for staff in the retail, care and catering industry. Training provisions were evaluated against the guidance in the relevant industry guides. Additional information was collected on the managers’ perceptions of and attitudes towards hygiene training. The extent and level of training of the retail butchers, who had to comply with the licensing regulations, was better than care homes and caterers of an equivalent size. Some of the care homes were not compliant with the training requirements of the Food Safety (General Food Hygiene) Regulations. There was a similar lack of hygiene management systems in most of the catering businesses in this study but senior staff were better trained and were able to provide in-house training to greater effect. All the businesses carried out on-the-job training, although in some this was restricted to induction training, the content of which was often ill defined. There was a lack of documented hygiene procedures, reinforcement strategies and very little refresher training activity. Many managers failed to provide feedback on performance, to test hygiene knowledge or praise good hygienic performance. Half of the managers were not trained to train, and often were untrained in elementary hygiene themselves. Some managers recognised that conditions in the workplace and time pressures could contribute to poor hygiene performances.