A cure for the HACCPs?

The Eight Bells

78 Kingston Road, Ewell, KT17 2DU

Tel: 0181-393 9973

Net turnover, total: £6,500-£7,500 per week

Net turnover, food: £1,000 per week

Staff: seven

Seats: 20

Covers: 200-300 per week

It is said that cleanliness is next to godliness, a statement that is especially true in the food industry where maintaining high levels of hygiene is encouraged as an almost religious practice. Training staff to keep to those standards, though, can be problematic and expensive, but the Greene King Pub Company thinks it's found a way.

The pub operator has recently launched a pilot scheme for a new interactive, computer-based training program in 47 of its 500 managed houses. The scheme is one of the first to take the formal rules of HACCP (Hazard Analysis, Critical Control Points) and convert them into a workable in-house training operation.

HACCP is the Department of Health's recommended formal system of hygienic practice. Put simply, it involves taking an objective look at how food is dealt with from delivery through cooking, storage and serving. Simon Burton, Greene King's training manager, believes it's a topic some staff aren't as knowledgable about as they should be.

"The main problem is awareness," he says. "People are just not as aware of hygiene issues or the risks to guests as perhaps they ought to be. They are certainly not as aware of some of the things that they can do to help prevent contamination in the food workplace."

Which is where the computer-based training (CBT) comes in. Each pub is issued with a PC installed with a training package of 10 relevant sections. These include, for example, pest control or food preparation, with each one designed to be completed as a separate exercise lasting for as little as 20 minutes.

Printed certificate

All 10 have to be completed by staff, who have to achieve a minimum pass rate of 70%. The program finishes with a final assessment to test their overall knowledge. If they are successful, it prints out a basic food hygiene certificate with details of the staff member's overall scores.

From a practical point of view, the package couldn't be easier. All that's needed is a basic knowledge of how to use a mouse to navigate the questions. For instance, in the personal hygiene section the user is presented with a picture of a dirty teenage kitchen worker, plasters on her fingers, greasy hair round her face and an indescribable something hanging out of her nose. As the user clicks on the offending articles they disappear and are replaced with how they should look.

The Eight Bells, in Ewell near London, which seats 20 and serves 200-300 covers a week, is one of the 47 piloted pubs, and manager Marlene Bowman enthuses about the system's benefits. "It's very easy to use and very easy to train staff to use," she says. "And that means I don't have to be there to watch over them, which is really good. I can get on with other things that need to be done."

All seven of the Eight Bells staff are certified now. Kitchen worker Linda Monk, for example, started at the pub nearly six months ago after a 22-year break from work raising a family. She admits to having no training in this field, let alone on computers.

So was it daunting? "It was, but I picked it up quite easily," Monk says. "It's really simple to use. It did tell me a lot of things that I didn't know about." She now admits that using the CBT has made her think differently, not just at work but also at home.

The program Greene King has piloted is Basic Food Hygiene by Creative Learning Solutions, the first to be endorsed by the Royal Institute of Public Health and Hygiene and the only package of its type to be awarded the institute's Certificate of Quality and Merit.

Burton says this was a key element. "We could have gone with any food-safety package, but we really needed one that had credibility in the marketplace. The important factor wasn't so much the piece of paper at the end but the training the individual was receiving."

So did Greene King have particular concerns that prompted this scheme in the first place? Burton says it was the interest in CBT which established the idea, but admits to some problems in stock rotation and food storage. "Other areas showed that people who had their basic food hygiene certificate had not had it renewed or hadn't been on any refresher training," he continues. "We needed to equip the managers with the tools to make that happen."

Burton was given a budget of £67,000 for the pilot scheme. The software cost £8,235 and the computers £48,810, the rest went on a manager training week and other expenses.

In the first 13-14 weeks of the scheme 112 staff have completed the course and Burton estimates that to send them on a normal training course would cost £79 per person so, in theory, the software has already paid for itself.

This has been a welcome outcome. "For the benefit of the pilot we never set any objectives or targets," Burton says. "What we wanted to learn from it was what people could achieve, and we're seeing that at the moment.

"We seem to have hit a market of people who have struggled to understand training in the past, whether they've sat in a classroom or read it. People have found it fun and enjoyable and they want more. We're now in a position where demand is much larger than supply."

The fact that it's a pilot scheme means feedback from house managers is essential and initial surveys have flagged up some interesting suggestions. For example, 26% wanted less text and more visuals and, surprisingly, 16% wanted a higher pass mark.

Greene King wants to expand the scheme to a further 150 pubs by the autumn. "The vision is to get it into all of them," Burton enthuses. "The aim is that every manager can have one computer and the courses can be downloaded from a central point. We'll be able to update from there for any part of the course, and it means we can monitor results centrally, too."

The possibilty is also there for topics other than HACCP. House managers have already suggested company induction courses, licensing law, fire safety, first aid and others.

"We also want to look at things like cookbooks," Burton says. "If we have a menu and want to train someone how to make a burger, for instance, then we can convert that to a CD and train kitchen people that way.

"That's particularly useful if we go through menu changes - we could just download them overnight."

But, for now, Burton sees the HACCP program pilot as a tangible accomplishment. "One of the key successes for me has been hearing people say, ‘I've changed my kitchen at home. I've changed my bathroom,'" he says. "I've even heard managers say that staff clean their hair now more than before and iron their shirts before they come into work." n