| Abstract: |
Digital technologies offer unprecedented opportunities to modernize official food safety control. Shift from paper- to digital-based systems enable recording and reporting data directly in digital format and further analyze and disclose inspection data. Further to this, digital technologies enable the automatization of processes through rule-based instructions, a fact that could positively influence the consistency of official control. Nevertheless, the extent of the use of digital technologies during official food safety control inspections by competent authorities (CAs) of European Union (EU) countries is not known. For this reason, the aim of this study was to assess the level of use of a digital environment during inspections at retail establishments. This was performed by administering a questionnaire to CAs from EU countries. A total of 88 national, regional or local CAs from 15 EU countries responded to the questionnaire. Of them, 62. 5% (55/88) used a digital environment during inspections, the majority to standardize data collection and reporting. CAs autotomize processes through digital technologies related to the management of official control and generation of inspection results, but to a lesser extent to automatize decision-making during inspections. Of the CAs not using a digital environment (37. 5%; 33/88), technological constraints and lack of economic resources were the two most prevalent reasons for not using such an environment. The use of digital technologies as decision support tools to standardize official controls and improve consistency and efficiency should be enhanced for the benefit of society. |
| Note: |
This multi-country survey study is the first research to our knowledge exploring the use of a digital environment during inspections in countries of the EU. This study underlines that many CAs in the EU countries already use a digital environment to support inspections at retail establishments. Moreover, the majority of CAs had similar reasons for and results derived from using this environment related to consistency of official control. In the same line, almost all CAs that use a digital environment carry out the same processes during inspections through such an environment. The results of this research provide interesting insights about the utility of digital technologies in official control, showing their possibilities and benefits. Moreover, these results might help policy-and decision-makers of CAs that do not use a digital environment during inspection to implement such an environment and improve the current official food control system.Based on our results, most of the CAs automate processes related to the management of official control. Those processes include the risk classification of food establishments, the selection of establishments to inspect according to their classification and the generation of notifications of follow-up inspections. Differences in applying the internal criteria of CAs for those processes would generate inconsistencies for example of how inspections for certain establishments are prioritized over the rest of establishments or frequencies of follow-up inspections. For instance, electronic work planning and scheduling tools are employed to support healthcare workers to actively remind upcoming events and prioritize visits (Labrique et al., 2013). By automatizing those processes, the responsibility to ensure that official control is performed consistently according to the internal guidelines relies on the criteria pre-established at the digital environment to automate the processes and not on officers' criteria. Likewise, this context may potentially help to prioritize risk-based planning of inspection visits and resource allocation. In view to automate processes according to a harmonized criterion, preliminary work has been developed in the EU to implement digital tools to support officers to automatically classify food when sampling according to the FoodEx2 classification (Nabais et al., 2022).Authors gratefully acknowledge and thank funding from the Barcelona Public Health Agency (Agència de Salut Pública de Barcelona, Spain) under Grant BEQU-2020-01.The opinions expressed by the authors in this paper are solely their responsibility and do not necessarily represent the official views of their organizations. We would like to acknowledge all competent authorities that responded to the questionnaire as well as the support and/or contribution in the revision and/or administration of the questionnaire to Triinu Allika and Kadi Padur (Agriculture and Food Board, Estonia), Tamara Schaeffer, Katja Hellwig and Glen Mans (Netherlands Food and Consumer Product Safety Authority (NVWA), Netherlands), Mireia Colom (Provincial Deputation of Barcelona (DIBA), Spain), Noelia Elchichini, Elena Barco and Paloma Cervera (Spanish Agency for Food Safety and Nutrition (AESAN), Spain), Renate Rehm and Birgit Hogeback (Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Consumer Protection of the State of Lower Saxony, Germany), the Heads of Food Safety Agencies (HoA) group, the Swedish Association of Local Authorities and Regions (SKR) (Sweden), Aivars Bērziņš (Institute of Food Safety, Animal Health and Environment "BIOR", Latvia), Stine Thielke and Vibeke Højbjerg (Danish Veterinary and Food Administration (DVFA), Denmark), and Peter Wend (Federal Office of Consumer Protection and Food Safety (BVL), Germany). Additionally, we also would like to thank Carme Borrell (Barcelona Public Health Agency (ASPB), Spain) for her helpful comments on a previous draft of this manuscript. The authors thank Tomás-Andrés Van Eeckhout Carter for the English grammar review. |
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(Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Departament de Ciència Animal i dels Aliments)
