ONTARIO: Eatery postings face delay

22.feb.08
London Free Press

Health officials' plans to post detailed restaurant inspection results at the doors of London eateries was again, according to this story, delayed last night when their board voted for further public consultation.
A sample inspection report presented last night was deemed too complex by some Middlesex-London Health Unit board members who found it too detailed. They lobbied instead for a simple colour-coded system akin to Toronto's.
Mark Studenny was quoted as saying, "I find it a little busy. There's so much secondary information that I don't think is needed."
Board member Viola Poletes Montgomery was quoted as saying, "I'm not going to read this. You need a colour-coded system that's easy to read."
Though the sample report included an explicit one-line explanation of each health breach, it was buried under four lines of text detailing the "compliance category" into which is falls.
Jim Reffle, the health unit's director of environmental health, was cited as cautioning against using something like the streetlight-colour system -- red (fail), yellow (cautionary pass) and green (pass).
That colour system, used in Toronto, could be too simple, making it unfair to restaurateurs, Reffle said. About 30 per cent of Toronto residents misread a yellow as "the kiss of death," which is unfair, he said. "We're saying, forget the yellow signs."
Health unit officials were chastened in November by the board, which rejected a plan in which inspection reports would only be made available online and at restaurants if customers requested the information.
At that time, Wally Adams, the health unit's environmental health manager, was cited as saying the restaurant industry "frowned" on a system that would mandate grades be posted openly.
Studenny, who is appointed to the board by the provincial Health Ministry, was quoted as saying, "I'm sure they would. The public has a right to know."
This issue, obviously sensitive to restaurant owners, was long ago tackled in Toronto, where an establishment must post its colour-coded results at the front door.
The importance of policing restaurant health standards -- including everything from kitchen cleanliness to safe food handling -- was detailed in a 2002 Los Angeles study.
Four years earlier, restaurants there were ordered to post their inspection records near front entrances. The number of people hospitalized with food-related illnesses dropped by more than 13 per cent after that.
"The public availability of this information can... create an economic incentive for restaurants to maintain good hygiene," the study read.