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Ever wonder if the food sitting in a buffet is being kept at the right temperature or whether that hotel hot tub is safe?

There is a simple on-line tool where you can look up inspection results for dozens of businesses throughout the Interior Health region.

Along with restaurants, the site provides investigation reports on things like public pools and hot tubs, personal service outlets, child care and tobacco sales.

“The public should know our inspection reports are posted so they can make their own informed decisions,” Amanda Anderson, team leader for Interior Health’s environmental health officers in Kelowna and the South Okanagan told iNFOnews.ca.

She was responding to an inquiry about a restaurant that was closed briefly after being inspected. That issue concerned a customer who had been sick in a washroom and inspectors had concerns about whether it had been properly disinfected. The inspector also found a number of cases where food was as warm as 16 Celsius when it should have been stored no higher than 4 C.

“For any types of food kept above 4 C or below 60 C, you have the potential to breed bacteria,” Anderson said.

In this, and all other cases, the inspectors work with the restauranteurs to make sure they follow safe food storage practices. They also check to make sure there isn’t contamination risks – such as raw meat being on a counter next to ready-to-serve food or stored in a cooler above produce.

If necessary, there will be repeat visits to make sure the rules are being followed and progressive enforcement leading to closures if they’re not.

In case where standards are not met, a restaurant can be closed until it returns to compliance and that may be shown in the reports. In the case cited above, the restaurant was closed for about 90 minutes so the inspection report does state "Closure" at the bottom, but it does not say how long that closure lasted for or whether it's still in effect.

Those follow-ups are not posted on-line, just the formal inspection reports.

“The Environmental Health Officers, when they go in, they evaluate the safety of the facility and the foods that they are serving and determine whether the restaurant is safe to open to the public,” Anderson said.

The inspection reports are on-line here.

They can be sorted by name, type of business, location or most recent inspection.

A quick look at 25 recent inspections showed only six with “critical infractions” for things like storage temperatures and chemical imbalance in a pool and hot tub. That means 19 businesses – mostly restaurants – were inspected and found to be clean and safe.

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News from © iNFOnews, 2019