Assessing the effectiveness of food worker training in Florida: opportunities and challenges

The task of measuring the effectiveness of food worker training has historically met with many challenges. This paper considers various approaches and utilizes trends in foodborne-outbreak contributing factors to evaluate a recent change in Florida's food worker training. Results show that subsequent to training, the relative incidence of many factors that contribute to foodborne outbreaks actuay increased, while the relative incidence of other factors decreased. The overall rate of foodborne outbreaks associated with the contributing factors that the authors studied decreased subsequent to training. Results of this analysis must be interpreted with caution because of multiple confounding factors; however, it became apparent that both increases and decreases in the occurrence of contributing factors could be used to focus future training material on areas of food handler practices in which it is needed. Further work needs to be done to estabish the most useful methods and approaches for assessing effectiveness and hence the public health impact of food worker training.