Chapter 3, Subject 4
QMP Reference Standard and Compliance Guidelines
Appendix D
Guidelines for the Development of a Personnel Hygiene Program

Anyone who works in a food handling area must maintain a high degree of personal cleanliness, and the way in which they work must also be clean and hygienic.

In developing the QMP Plan, management must:

• decide what training or supervision their food handlers need by identifying the areas of their work most likely to affect food hygiene. Food handlers must receive adequate supervision, instruction, and/or training in food hygiene.
• take care to ensure that no persons, while known or suspected to be suffering from, or to be a carrier of, a disease likely to be transmitted through food or while afflicted with infected wounds, skin infections, sores, or with diarrhoea, is permitted in any food handling areas in any capacity in which there is a likelihood of that person directly or indirectly contaminating the food with pathogenic micro-organisms.

The Codex Alimentarius General Principles of Food Hygiene lists the following illnesses and injuries which should be reported to management so that any need for medical examination and/or possible exclusion from food handling can be considered: jaundice; diarrhoea; vomiting; fever; sore throat with fever; visibly infected skin lesions (boils, cuts, etc.); and discharges from the ear, eye, or nose.

The Prerequisite Plan should contain an effective written personnel hygiene program, which addresses the following:

1. Communication of the company policy on personnel hygienic practices, including communicable diseases, to employees, visitors and guests.
2. Cleanliness and conduct of personnel, including hand washing, use of hand and/or foot dips, clothing or jewellery which could contaminate food, unsanitary behaviour or practices
3. The health of personnel, including prevention of personnel suffering from a communicable disease or with open cuts or wounds from being employed in a processing area of an establishment.
4. Prevention of contamination and cross-contamination of the food product by control over the storage of employee personal belongings, and the control of personnel and visitor traffic.

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