Deficiencies in Food Safety Practices and Storage
Penalty
Summary
The facility failed to ensure food was prepared, stored, served, or distributed in accordance with professional standards of food safety. During a kitchen tour, several metal pans were found stacked while still wet in the clean and ready-to-use storage area. Both the Dietary Manager and Registered Dietitian confirmed that dishes and pans should be completely air-dried before storage to prevent bacterial growth, as supported by facility policy and the FDA Food Code. Additionally, the blade of the can opener was observed to be worn, with the metal surface worn off, which could lead to physical contamination of food. The Dietary Manager acknowledged the blade should be replaced, and facility policy requires proper maintenance and replacement of worn blades. In the walk-in refrigerator, raw ground turkey was found thawing next to cooked deli meats, with some cooked meats placed below the raw meat. Both the Dietary Manager and Registered Dietitian confirmed this was improper, as raw meats should be stored below cooked or ready-to-eat foods to prevent cross-contamination. Facility policies require the use of drip pans under thawing meats and proper arrangement of raw and cooked foods based on cooking temperature requirements. The improper arrangement and lack of drip pans were confirmed during interviews and policy review. Further deficiencies were noted in the manual dishwashing process, where a Dietary Aide was unable to accurately verbalize the correct immersion time for sanitizing dishes in the 3-compartment sink. The posted instructions and facility policy required a 60-second immersion, but the aide stated 15-30 minutes, and the Dietary Manager stated 15 seconds. Additionally, resident food refrigerators and freezers at nursing stations were not maintained at safe temperatures, with logs showing repeated out-of-range temperatures and no corrective actions documented. Some temperature logs were prefilled before the appropriate shift, and staff were unaware that the temperature ranges used were for medication storage, not food. These failures were confirmed through observation, interviews, and policy review.