A Qualitative Study On Problems Of School Canteen Sanitation And Countermeasures Coping With Them In Rural Areas Of Western And Middle Parts Of China

Children are so young that they can not distinguish and keep away from hazards. And they are vulnerable to the impact of the surrounding environment. School environment maybe have great influence on the children's development and growth. The prior task of school management for the principals is to create a safe, healthy environment for children to learn. Food safety is one key part to create safety school, and is effective to prevent the food-borne diseases and other related infectious disease outbreak and prevalence among students. Hygienic situation of canteen also effectively guarantee the children's food safety and their development. This project aims to understanding of the current hygienic condition of rural school canteens in rural school canteen, the major management problems existing in rural school canteens, so as to seek countermeasures and improve the hygienic condition in rural school canteens, so as to ensure health of students.Objective:To understand the current hygienic condition of school canteens in rural areas of western and middle parts of China; To get to know what are the main problems of management and acquire suggestion on how to improve the food hygiene by interviewing the leaders who are in charge of school health ; And to provide evidence for government to develop proper policy on food hygiene management in rural school; to improve food hygiene condition to ensure students health and prevent food-borne infectious diseases outbreak among school-aged children. Methods:We selected 6 provinces randomly and stratified by the difference of economy and precipitation distribution in each province as well as geographical position. In each province, we selected 2 counties randomly. One of the 2 counties is near to the center city, while another is that its economy ranks in the middle level of this province. In each county, we selected 2 schools randomly. One school is located in county, and another is in town. We interviewed the leader who is in charge of food hygiene in these counties. And a field observe is conducted by trained professionals, in order to know the hygienic status of school canteen. The information we collected include the current hygienic situation, the main problem of management, and the advice on how to improve the food hygiene. Thematic framework analysis method is used to analyze the qualitative data, while all data from the questionnaires was analyzed by using spss11.0.Results:1. A great number of principals considered it is necessary to build canteen in rural schools and that is helpful to maintain the normal order of school; lots of principals thought canteen should be run by staff of school; the school canteen must hold hygienic license and the employees of canteen must possess health certificate; the understanding rate of laws are lower among principals, because of lack training on food hygiene related laws and rules; the prominent problems in rural schools include lack of sanitary equipments, low health awareness of employees, poor management and lacking nutrition knowledge of staffs.2. The leaders in charge of food hygiene of province considered whether a canteen should be built in a rural school according to the school the real need of students and the capability of school; the rate of holding hygienic license is rather low in the rural school canteen; Compare with hygiene license, the rate of holding heath certificate in employees is relatively higher; Government regularly organize training for principals such as how to run canteen and laws related to food hygiene; they also suggested how to improve the school health condition, particular on food safety, such as training the employees, increasing funds for building the basic health facilities and so on.3. In school of rural area, outdoor and indoor of canteen environment are not good; Overall distribution of canteen are not up to the hygienic standard in many rural school; Basic hygienic facilities in school canteens are deficiency; the sanitation of place for stocking food raw materials are in good condition; employees of school canteen are lack of good habit to maintain food safety.Conclusions:The food hygienic situation of countryside school is unsatisfactory. There are many hygienic problems in rural school canteen. Such as lack of sanitary equipments, low health awareness of employees, poor management and lacking nutrition knowledge of staffs and so on. Suggested that Government should increase funds and sets up special funds for school canteen, improves the basic hygienic facilities of school canteen in rural area; and organize periodic training on the canteen managers to improve the management of canteen; strengthening training for employees to raise their hygienic consciousness and awareness of responsibility; Health supervision departments regularly supervise and guidance of the canteens work of school, and related departments do the food health work of school canteen corporately; Proper hygiene standard for rural school cafeterias should be developed in order to improvehygiene condition of the canteen and promote students health.