ADVANCEMENT OF THE PRACTICE
Open Access
BUILDING CAPACITY
Building Capacity By Tracking Your Time and Activity
Darryl Booth, MBA
2. The intent is to deliver at least one rou- tine inspection per year, which is 1,200 inspections each year. ( Note . The intent might be more than one inspection per year if your agency assigns risk categories and embraces a risk-based inspection fre- quency as per Standard 3 and Annex 5.) 3. The VNRFRPS suggest that one full-time employee (FTE) inspector might be able to handle 280–320 inspection events per year. 4. That is between three and five FTE inspectors. 5. As a placeholder, let us use $120,000 as the “fully burdened” cost of a qualified inspector, which is intended to include salary, benefits, oce space, equipment, administration, supervision, transportation, and training. 6. Therefore, each facility’s permit and/or license fee is going to be in the neighbor- hood of $450 per year. Table 1 provides a visual picture of this example. Please consider this example through your lens and integrate your unique agency circumstances. Also note that varia- tions are published in the Alternative Stan- dard 8 Workbook 2023 (see Sidebar). As a Personal Discipline The previous example paints with broad strokes. Every contributor has meetings, “Time is what we want most, but what we use worst.” William Penn
Editor’s Note: A need exists within environmental health agencies to increase their capacity to perform in an environment of diminishing resources. With limited resources and increasing demands, we need to seek new approaches to the practice of environmental health. Acutely aware of these challenges, the Journal publishes the Building Capacity column to educate, reinforce, and build on successes within the profession using technology to improve eciency and extend the impact of environmental health agencies. Column contributors are guest authors. The conclusions of this column are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent the views or policies of NEHA. Darryl Booth has been monitoring regulatory and data tracking needs of environmental public health agencies for more than 20 years. He is the manager of U.S. operations for Hedgerow Software.
I started a new job this week, one in which my responsibilities are divided between two functions. The expectation is that I will spend 75% of my time on project A and 25% of my time on project B. For many years, I have touted the benefit of daily time and activity tracking. I would explain that if you did not know your time per program and task, how could you know if your permit and/or license fees are defen- sible? I remember one environmental health director who carried his department’s time accounting data into the board of supervi- sor meetings as his best explanation (or defense) for why fees had to be adjusted. In his case, the fees had to be adjusted to o er any chance of meeting the minimum stang and service expectations, and he let the data tell the story.
Standard 8 The Voluntary National Retail Food Regula- tory Program Standards (VNRFRPS) from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) express an expectation for program support and resources. This guidance ensures that retail food regulatory programs are equipped with the necessary resources—both human and financial—to deliver those services reliably and e ectively. That narrative around Standard 8 speaks to stang, productivity, administra- tive overhead, budgeting, and resources. Whether an agency is pursuing the VNRFRPS or is targeting its own organiza- tional goals, there comes a time when you just must simply “show your work.” As a simplified example: 1. A food safety program is responsible for monitoring 1,200 retail food facilities.
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Volume 87 • Number 9
https://doi.org/10.70387/001c.137195
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