The Integrated Food Safety System Toolkit
Goals of the IFSS Toolkit
The goals of the IFSS Toolkit are to help public health, environmental health, and food regulatory agencies and laboratories:
- Better understand current integration efforts in their jurisdiction,
- Identify specific IFSS practices and activities that will improve the integration performance of all stakeholders, and make plans to implement those activities.
Target Audience
The IFSS Toolkit has been developed for stakeholders involved in food safety and food defense.
The Toolkit is designed to be used within an organization and used by an interdisciplinary Workgroup with knowledge and practical experience in food safety and food defense. Use of the Toolkit by these teams will provide a broader context for assessing an organization’s current integration efforts and identify potential areas for improvement, especially with respect to cross-agency/cross-discipline activities.
Use of the Toolkit with these teams will allow stakeholders to become more familiar with the roles and responsibilities of each team member, facilitate communication, and engender team-building in the process. Knowing each other and understanding each other’s roles will lead to a more integrated system.
Although the interdisciplinary Workgroup is the ideal target audience, the Toolkit also can be used by persons from a single program, agency, or discipline, or even a single person within an agency who acts as a “champion” for the cause. Because integration is a team effort, however, such an approach could be recognized as more limited in scope.
