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Impact Report

For plan KA 703. Nutrition Education and Behavior (McKinley County Nutrition Plan of Work )
Date August 11, 2009, 10:03 pm
For Objective Long-term Show long-term objectives
Impact Report July 11, 2009 Regional Early Care and Education Conference UNM Gallup Branch/Calvin Hall Gallup, NM 87301 Keeping Kids Safe -Food Safety for Child Care Providers Session I 8:00am-10:00am Session II 10:15am-12:15pm Today more than ever, food safety is emerging as an important issue for childcare providers. About 80% of children under the age of six receive some form of non-parental care and the number continues to grow as more women seek work outside their homes. Several issues were covered at both of the sessions. Issue number one covered the importance of keeping your food safe from an invisible enemy who is ready to strike BAC (bacteria). Four simple steps were shared with the groups to use for keeping their food safe from harmful bacteria: clean-sanitize and disinfect regularly (tables, counters cutting boards, mixers, washing all fruit, vegetables etc.), separate-avoid cross contamination (keep raw foods such as raw meat, poultry, fish away from vegetables use different cutting boards for meat, fish, poultry and vegetables), cook-cook meat to proper temperatures (the proper way to use a meat thermometer to make sure that food has reached the proper internal temperature) and chill-maintain refrigerator temperature at 40 degrees and freezer at 0 degrees F. (store hot foods in shallow containers vs. stock pot, do not stack containers, etc.). We also provided hands on activities to show how rapidly bacteria grow when food is not refrigerated promptly after meals. The second issue covered the importance of safe diapering: use the diapering area only for diapering, keep changing table clean and disinfected after each use, and always wash your hands and child’s hands after diapering, these are just a few examples that were shared with the child care providers. Day care providers need to be especially careful with safe diapering because children in diapers present special sanitation and health problems and at that age they are very susceptible to food borne Illnesses due to their undeveloped immune systems. Also, during this time we talked about the proper way to store formula leftovers, preparing bottles and safety tips for ready to eat baby food (serving baby food on a plate vs. feeding from the jar and the correct way to store leftovers). Issue three covered safe time limits for keeping food refrigerated, or frozen, thawing tips, wrap foods in aluminum foil, zip lock bags or plastic containers with lids to preserve leftovers. We provided participants with a handout that lists foods that don’t need to stay cold/foods that need to stay cold and field trip food safety. Finally, the last activities included: a “Find the Hazards” work sheet, a short quiz on food safety (what they had learned during the presentation), and Storage Safety. The storage safety activity involves identifying different ingredients. 12 ingredients (the ingredients include non food items) are stored in zip lock bags, there are no labels on the packages, and the goal of this activity is for participants to find the correct ingredients for the Cake and Frosting Recipe. This activity shows how easy it is to make a mistake (choosing a bag of Ajax Cleanser instead of flour) in identifying ingredients that are not labeled, therefore stressing how important it is to label small amounts of ingredients that you do not want to discard. Following these activities 20 minutes at each session was spent reviewing Food Safety and Family Preparedness using the information provided to us by your office. A total of 71 participants attended both sessions and participated in the activities 68 of them were female and 3 were male. 13 females were Hispanic, 8 females were White, and 50 were Native American this total includes 3 males who were also Native American.