Los Angeles County Public Health making a major change to its restaurant grading system

Restaurants and markets that are shut down for vermin infestations, sewage problems or for a lack of water will no longer be able to receive an A health grade in Los Angeles County under a stricter grading system to be implemented over the next year.

Los Angeles County Department of Public Health officials outlined changes to how restaurant inspectors deduct points when assigning health grades in a report submitted to the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors late Thursday.

Currently, a restaurant can receive an A letter grade even when it is ordered closed or when two major violations, such as unsafe food temperatures, are observed because major violations only cost food facilities four points out of a possible 100 points.

Under the new point deduction system, which will be enforced sometime in early 2017, any time a restaurant is closed for a cockroach, rodent or fly infestation, sewage problems, or for not having any water ruing through the facility, it will lose an additional seven points for the closure. Any time two major health hazards, such as unsafe food temperatures, are observed, the facility will lose an additional three points in their inspection score.

“It’s important for the credibility of the program,” said Terri Williams, acting director of the county Department of Public Health’s environmental health division, referring to the changes. “You want the public to know when they go into a restaurant that has an A in the window that the restaurant truly eaed that A.”

County health officials have been discussing several recommendations, including changing the point value system, with representatives from the Califoia Restaurant Association, the county’s Food Safety Advisory Council and neighboring health departments over the last 10 months.

The recommendations were proposed after a Southe Califoia News Group review of nearly two years of restaurant inspection data found the county’s grading system allows many restaurants and markets to operate with major health threats and gives those facilities high health grades.

Thursdays’s report is the eighth and final progress report on the implementation of those recommendations.

“There were some areas that needed to be improved upon so the thought was, identify those areas thoroughly, evaluate them and see what we can do to make them better,” Williams said, acknowledging the county’s widely emulated letter-grading system has gone largely unchanged since 1998.

Although the county was the first agency that posted inspection information in the public view, the health department only began tracking inspection data for retail food facility, food truck, housing, and swimming pool inspections in 2013.

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“A lot of these decisions are based on data,” Williams said, adding that when the department invested in the software that tracks the data, Envision Coect, health officials realized the system would provide them the information they needed to make improvements. “This is just the begiing.”

As part of the changes, the county will also begin issuing new health grade cards this summer that will show the public the date of a food facility’s last graded inspection. Later on, a QR code will be added to the cards to provide more information about facilities’ inspection history.

Instead of linking the code to the county’s inspection database, as originally proposed, the code will take users to a dashboard that would show past inspection scores, a summary of the health code violations observed, and, potentially, a comparison of like restaurants in the area.

“We’re still in the process of designing that,” Williams said, adding that whatever trend analyses the department comes up with would not only help the public make decisions about where to eat, it would also help health officials and restaurant operators understand and improve upon their specific food safety challenges.

None of the changes outlined in Thursday’s report will affect the health permit fees that restaurant operators pay each year nor do they require board approval to implement.

As inspectors begin to issue the new grade cards, health officials will work to inform operators about the changes to the point deductions until they feel operators have had enough time to lea about the changes.

“We put a lot of thought into it,” Williams said. “We believe there’s a lot of value in our restaurant grading program in LA County and so it’s vital for us to keep the integrity of the program high.”