Food Protection Trends - May/June 2020 - 156

TABLE 1. Number of health inspections conducted by types (N = 3,174)
Type of inspection

Routine
Follow-up
Pre-opening
Complaint
Total

2,984
177
11
2
3,174

94.0
5.6
0.3
0.1
100

TABLE 2. Number of food violations during school health inspections (N = 3,180)
Type of violations

Mean ± SD

Critical Violation
Non-critical Violation
Total

1,108
2,072
3,180b

1.53 ± 0.88
1.90 ± 1.40

Number of violations found at school foodservice operations from January 2013 through December 2018
0 number of violations excluded from the total

METHODS
The study analyzed data on a total of 509 schools from
28 counties in the state of Missouri, using health inspection
results that were available to the public on each county's
website. From the list of all foodservice operations with
inspection results from each county, only schools were
used as the sample of this study. Accordingly, there was
no need to obtain approval from the Institutional Review
Board, because the data collected were available to all
on the website. All violations from school foodservice
operations in Missouri were coded and then cross-checked
by two research assistants. Health inspection data on
Missouri School foodservice operations from January 2013
through December 2018 were collected and analyzed for
the study. Routine inspections, follow-ups, complaints,
and pre-opening permits at school foodservice operations
were included. Health inspections had been performed by
personnel in each county health department in accordance
with Missouri state laws and regulations. Inspection results
with scale grading, letter grades and similar results that did
not include critical or non-critical violation codes were
removed from the analysis. Although Missouri has 114
counties (31), the study utilized school health inspection
results from only 28 counties, as data from these were
available to the public. The data included information such as
the name of the school, type of inspection, county, location,

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Food Protection Trends May/June

phone number, date of inspection, and type of foodservice
provided. The collected data were analyzed by use of the IBM
SPSS 25.0 statistical package.
RESULTS
Descriptive statistics
This study examined the relationship between the results
of Missouri school service operations health inspections and
food safety violations. The results, a total of 3,176 inspection
results from 509 school foodservice operations, indicated
the types of inspection conducted: routine, follow-up, preopening, and complaint (Table 1). Of all inspections, routine
inspection (n = 2984, 94.0%) was the most frequently
conducted, followed by follow-up (n = 177, 5.6%), preopening (n = 11, 0.3%), and complaint (n = 2, 0.1%).
Table 2 shows the total number of critical and non-critical
violations recorded during these health inspections. A total
of 1,108 critical violations (M = 1.53, SD ± 0.88) and 2,072
(M = 1.90, SD ± 1.40) non-critical violations were found.
The number of both critical and non-critical violations were
rank-ordered by county, as shown in Table 3 and 4. The
number of food codes for each one of the critical violations
was computed. Of the 28 counties, the top four with the most
critical food code violations were identified. As shown in
Table 3, Clay County (n = 295, 26.6%) was the county having
the most critical violations, followed by Cape Girardeau (n

Food Protection Trends - May/June 2020

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