Following the introduction of South Australia’s new Food Act, Adelaide City Council is using a high tech management tool called Audit-Easy for external auditing and inspections. Auditing is done on a palm computer and reporting is automated through the downloading of data to a PC. The program ensures that Council’s environmental health officers adopt a uniform approach to inspections.
Audit-Easy decreases the time it takes to input data and prepare audit reports for businesses and reduces paper transactions, giving staff more time for proactive initiatives such as hygiene and safety lectures.
Principal Health Officer, Jack Darzanos, said individual businesses were required to determine the regulations, codes and standards they needed to comply with.
“Food premises can no longer rely on a knock at the door from Council inspectors to ensure their kitchen facilities are up to scratch,” he said. “The onus is now on the business to ensure it is complying with the relevant environmental health regulations.City based childcare centres and accommodation houses must ensure they meet appropriate standards.”
Audit-Easy has had the following benefits.
- Removing duplication ofcrecords and reducing paper based information.
- Building a Questions database with a hierarchical structure.
- Generating Audit Plans for individual auditees, regions, teams, or time periods and tracking the status of each audit.
- Providing supplementary information to questions as needed.
- Building a stored list of standard comments and responses and using these during any audit.
- Viewing and printing an Action List of outstanding audit questions.
- Issuing Action Requests for significant deficiencies.
- Obtaining immediate results in the field without the need for office based processing and administration.
- Standardised processes for all auditees and auditing personnel.
For further information contact Jack Darzanos telephone (08) 8203 7416.
