Food Safety, Sanitation, and Hair Restraint Failures in Dietary Services
Penalty
Summary
The deficiency involves multiple failures in food storage, preparation, sanitation, temperature monitoring, and use of hair restraints in the facility kitchen, with the potential to affect all 81 residents. During a kitchen tour, surveyors observed several refrigerated food items past their labeled use-by dates, including applesauce and sliced apples dated 12/3–12/9, shredded cheddar cheese with a use-by date of 1/3, and half a ham dated 12/28–1/3, despite facility policy requiring refrigerated foods to be covered, labeled, and dated with a use-by date. The Dietary Manager confirmed that staff write use-by dates on containers and that these foods should have been used by those dates. The menu review showed that Caribbean pork roast was served on a different day than originally scheduled because the roasts were not available on the planned day. Surveyors also observed a cook working in the kitchen without a hair net, instead wearing a winter stocking hat, contrary to the facility’s Hair Restraints/Jewelry/Nail Polish Policy requiring hairnets at all times in the kitchen. The same cook was seen washing and rinsing a dirty blender and lid in the three-compartment sink, then using a sanitizer hose to rinse them without submerging them in sanitizer solution for at least one minute, and without allowing them to air dry, even though the sanitizer compartment contained no solution. After preparing pureed green beans in the blender, solution was seen dripping from the bottom of the blender onto the counter as the food was poured into a pan. When the lunch meal was being plated and sent to the units, the food temperature log for that meal had no recorded temperatures, and the cook stated he forgot to record them, despite facility policy and another cook’s statement that all hot and cold foods should be temperature-checked and documented at the end of cooking. The Dietary Manager later stated that anyone entering the kitchen must wear a hair net and that equipment must be fully submerged in sanitizer for at least one minute and then air dried, consistent with posted manufacturer instructions and the facility’s manual sanitizing policy.
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