Clients' safe food-handling knowledge and risk behavior in a home-delivered meal program.

OBJECTIVE: To determine typical handling practices of home-delivered meals, and provide appropriate handling instructions to reduce the risk of foodborne illness by improving consumer handling of home-delivered meals. DESIGN: Once permission was given by the home-delivered meal site directors, clients were provided a voluntary survey and requested by the delivery drivers to complete the self-administered questionnaire. The completed questionnaire was collected by the driver the following day. Because of the special needs of the home-delivered meal populations, the questionnaire was made as easy and convenient to answer as possible. SUBJECTS: Two hundred fifty-eight male clients (31%) and 575 female clients (69%) whose mean age was 79 years participated in the study. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: The respondents' safe food-handling practices, food safety knowledge, and demographic information were assessed. Average time for delivery and consumption of meals were also measured. STATISTICAL ANALYSIS: Descriptive statistics (frequency and chi(2) test) of the participants' handling of home-delivered meals, their general food safety knowledge, and demographic information were reported. Delivery time and consumption time were calculated for each subject. RESULTS: Five hundred thirty-six of 869 clients (63%) reported that they ate their meals as soon as they were delivered. Of those clients who did not eat their meals immediately, 234 (82%) stored the cold food in the refrigerator and 142 (58%) stored the hot food in the freezer. More than one-third of the clients (n=277, 35%) reported that they had leftovers and only 34 (15%) ate the leftovers within 2 hours. Significant differences among groups on the basis of a derived food safety knowledge score were observed in terms of whether or not they ate their meal immediately (P

Mitigating the risk of food handling in the home-delivered meal program.

The purpose of this cross-sectional study was to examine the length of time between packing and delivery of home-delivered meals, and the extent of foodborne illness risk to the elderly. Procedures to mitigate that risk were also evaluated. Researchers surveyed 95 drivers from home-delivered meal preparation sites in six states across the United States to determine the average length of time that passed during packing, loading, leaving, and delivery. The efficiency of various risk mitigation methods were evaluated and used to adjust the actual delivery time. Total average delivery time from packing to last delivery was 1.92 hours. This study suggests that the risk associated with the actual 1.92 hours of total delivery time could be mitigated to represent approximately 1.55 hours of effective time with proper packing and holding conditions. This methodology proposes a single measure for evaluating the effectiveness of various handling procedures associated with distributing home-delivered meals, which can be utilized to evaluate overall risk when combined with in-house preparation and client-handling behaviors.