What is SAVA?

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Host Ulysses Garrett: 
Greetings and welcome to another brand new episode of ORA Speaks, brought to you by the Office of Regulatory Affairs and the Office of Communications and Project Management. My name is Ulysses Garrett, the multimedia manager in the Office of Communications and Project Management. Hope everyone had a very safe, fun and relaxing summer.

These past three months went by very quickly, if you ask me, but today I'm super excited about today's episode because we're going to highlight the importance of the partnerships that the FDA does with our state, local, territorial and tribal partners, along with other government agencies. On today's episode, we're talking about training and coursework that was developed to help improve food inspections and programs across the country. This tremendous work has been done collaboratively through the FDA with our Office of Training, Education and Development, Office of State Cooperative programs, divisions of retail food protection and the National Environmental Health Association to help create the self-assessment verification audit course which will assist any jurisdictions interested in FDA Voluntary National Recall Food regulatory program standards.

I know there's a lot to unpack and I'm eager to learn more about this great work being done. Today I'm joined by some individuals who are very familiar with the course. My first guest is Deirdra Holloway, a program manager in the Office of Training and Education and Development; followed by Anna Floyd, an instructional designer for the National Environmental Health Association (NEHA); and Steve Nattrass, a retail food specialist in the FDA; and Jason Regan, the director of Environmental Health for Gwinnett, Newton and Rockdale County Health Department. Hello to you all and thank you for joining me.

First and foremost, let's get into this course.

Dierdre, do you mind giving us a brief synopsis of why this course is important, followed by Steve with why the course was created?

Ms. Deirdra Halloway:
Sure. I'd be happy to. More than three thousand state, local and tribal agencies have the primary responsibility to regulate retail, food and food service industries in the United States. They are responsible for the inspection. Oversight of over one million food establishments: Restaurants and grocery stores, as well as vending machines, cafeterias and other outlets in healthcare facilities, schools and correctional facilities. That's a lot of service points. FDA assist in the regulatory agencies and the industries they regulate by providing the model food code for potential adoption, scientifically based guidance, training, program evaluation and technical assistance. With the Voluntary National Retail Food Regulatory Program Standards, they were adopted to provide the jurisdictions - a framework towards building a highly effective and responsive program for the regulation of all those food services and retail food establishments  I just mentioned. It's important to the FDA to provide training on using these standards to guide a retail food protection program, which can take many forms.

Mr. Steve Nattrass:
And to add to Deirdra's comments, there's been a tremendous interest in the FDA's Voluntary National Retail Food Regulatory Program Standards, or FDA retail standards for short. These standards provide a system upon which food regulatory programs can build or enhance their programs for continuous improvement process. Currently, there are nine hundred and forty nine enrolled jurisdictions. We have twenty three FDA retail food specialists providing customer service and technical assistance to enroll jurisdictions through various means. To leverage our limited resources, we provide self-assessment verification audit workshops to help enroll jurisdictions become better at evaluating their programs as well as others. Typically, we hold two national workshops and two virtual workshops annually. But clearly this is not enough to meet the needs of our partners. Thus, the online course series was created to fill in that gap and also to serve as a refresher for those who have completed the regular workshop. In short, the on-demand access provides unlimited access to participants when it's convenient for them. This was not an easy process, so we sought out assistance in building out the online course series.

Mr. Garrett: 
Thank you very. I didn't have approach designing the online course series. Anna, can you elaborate on that for me?

Ms. Anna Floyd:
Sure. I'd be happy to. The first thing we considered was the complexity and the interactivity of FDA's existing face to face SAVA courses. These were the courses that we were building the online version from and we really wanted the participants experiences to be similar - whether they had the opportunity to take the courses in person or online. In the face to face course, participants have the opportunity for a lot of you know, question and answer. And a lot of community discussion with other people who are going through the same process. So, when we were designing this online course series, which is one that is self-paced and doesn't have a facilitator, we really wanted to be sure that the content was as clear as possible and that we could also bring in real world experiences to kind of replace the discussions that would typically happen in person. So, some of the features we put into the online courses to meet those two objectives include interviews with people who have successfully gone through the self-assessment process for different standards and we also integrated a lot of the real world questions that have come through the clearing house work group. Finally, we realized that it could be difficult to stay alert and engaged when taking a course by yourself in the quiet of your own office - so we work closely with our graphics and media team members to create interesting characters to make the courses feel livelier and more engaging.

Mr. Garrett: 
I see. Do you mind telling us about the process of working with FDA and specifically two different components of FDA?

Ms. Anna Floyd:
Sure. Yeah. Working with FDA on this project has been a pleasure, because you feel so closely connected to the material. FDA played a significant role in the original development of these standards and continues to work toward the support of people who are in the process of achieving the standards. Everyone we collaborated with at FDA was really invested in helping this project succeed, which ultimately comes back to support the people, working in the field, making these standards come to life, and supporting the health of people living in their jurisdictions. So feeling the synergy around that dedication in our team was really wonderful.

Mr. Garrett:
So, Steve, how did your office support the creation of the series of courses?

Mr. Steve Nattrass:
Sure Ulysses. Our retail food protection division at the Office of State Cooperative Programs is in a unique position to provide the subject matter expertise to ensure the content was technically accurate. These retail food specialist SMEs also recommended state, local, tribal and territorial experts that can provide testimony and also share best practices that they use to meet standards. Five FDA retail food specialists, along with a CFSAN subject matter expert, review the material and completed final course reviews to ensure a great product was developed. As technical lead, I made sure that there was coverage of the work, as well as ensuring that Anna and her team had prompt answers to any questions that arose to make sure that the project was kept on schedule. Throughout the whole process, it truly was a collaborative effort among our FDA components and also NEHA.

Mr. Garrett:
Thank you very much. Jason, can you describe the process for working with NEHA?

Mr. Jason Reagan:
Sure so, Charles Powell, who was a former NEHA employee had reached out to me and asked if he could interview our department so we could help provide content for an introductory module that was part of the new SAVA course that they were helping develop. And so Charles set up an online virtual call for interview.

Mr. Garrett:
Can you talk about the discussion during the interview and how did that contribute to the course content?

Mr. Jason Reagan:
So, Charles conducted the interview. It was back in July of 2021 and some of the points discussed were basically sharing our experiences and meeting and participating in the retail program standards. We discussed which retail program standard we started with and why; discussed how our FDA retail food specialists helped us along the way; and really how they played a key role in our journey of meeting the retail program standards. We discussed the benefits of being part of the mentorship grant and becoming a verification auditor. And then we closed out the interview by encouraging other jurisdictions to participate in the standards because of how beneficial the retail standards can be to their food safety program.

Mr. Garrett:
Thank you very much, sir. Anna, how about? What do you think helped make this course development so successful?

Ms. Anna Floyd:
Yeah, I think there were three things that really came together to make this so successful. First, we had a wonderful team of folks at FDA, led by Steve at OSCP and by Deirdra at OTED. Our retail food specialists working with Steve were committed to the success of the project and the process of reviewing each course in the series at multiple stages of project development. We had six folks on this team along with Steve, including Dave Engelskirchen, Katie Kennedy, Michael Nordos, Becky Steiner and Brad Tiptoe. Robert Sutler, John Marcelo and Chris Smith were also part of the team and incredibly supportive. There are ten courses that we created as part of this series and each course had multiple production stages that required review. So this team was quite busy.

Second, the self-assessment SMEs we worked with were incredible. We filmed interviews with twenty six people who had real world experience achieving different standards within their own jurisdiction. They were so enthusiastic about the retail standards and happy to share their experience, as well as convey how much their work towards the standards improved food safety in their own jurisdictions.

Finally, we also had a wonderful team of folks at NEHA, including our learning technologist, Santiago Escura; our graphic artist, Seth Aaron; our media specialist, Nick Ogg; and also Charles Powell; our editor, Melody Lake; as well as two internal SMEs: Vance Baker and Mario Eseminara. They worked closely with the retail program standards themselves. And of course, also our Associate Director of Education, Dr. Sharon Unkart, who served as an instructional design SME.

Mr. Garrett:
Thank you very much. And Jason, one more question for you. How do you see this course being impactful?

Mr. Jason Reagan:
The course will be used as a tool for us to help train our upcoming staff that will be participating in our departments, maintaining of the program standards. The course provides overall insights and ideas on evaluating our food safety program as it relates to US meeting and maintaining the program standards. It also helps us identify what gaps we may still have regarding the areas that we need to improve upon. So, as the retail program standards evolve and are updated alongside the SAVA course, this process will help us stay current on the path we need to be on to continue to meet the standards. With this readily available online, I can see this being of great help to all jurisdictions that are enrolled in the program standards, both new and existing jurisdictions.

Mr. Garrett:
Awesome. Thank you for your insight on that. Steve, can you elaborate how, under the agency's proposal to unify the Human Foods Program and create a new model for ORA, how will projects such as the self-assessment verification audit course be impacted?

Mr. Steve Nattrass:
Well, the proposal presented by the Commissioner will ensure that we have a strong one stop shop for local, state, tribal and territorial food safety partnership projects, such as SAVA. This is being done by unifying state and local food safety partnership functions in certain aspects of our international food safety partnerships into one Office of Integrated Food Safety System Partnerships in the new proposed Human Foods Program in FDA. Right now those functions are currently housed across ORA, the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, and the Office of Food Policy and Response. We're excited to achieve the vision of a true integrated food safety system.

Mr. Garrett:
And Deirdre, do you mind bringing us home with some final words on this great course?

Ms. Deirdra Halloway:
I'd be happy to. First, I want to thank the national retail food team who is comprised of individuals from many offices who focused on the public health issues in the retail food environment, including all those people that worked on this project, we say thank you so much for your dedication and your expertise on this. Many of the projects included an online courses focused on specific topics, face to face courses and program standards. The online SAVA complements the in person training and provides a training platform to review and refresh the steps needed for each of the program standards. And within our LMS, somebody can go back over and over again just to review those steps on the online format. SAVA has ten modules, so you'll see it listed as a curriculum. After completing the introduction module (that is mandatory), which shows you how to get through the remaining nine modules, you can look into any of those program standard modules that you want. You do not have to do it in order. You can select just the ones that you're interested to implement within your office. These courses are found on our LMS called LearnEd. So, it's the same platform that we use for all of our courses, where everybody's transcripts are kept. So, like Steve was saying, it's a one complete package here. So, easy to access. And if you have a regulatory agency looking to gain access and start your courses, don't hesitate to reach out to your FDA retail food specialist or even myself. I am so happy to help anybody who's interested in looking more into the SAVA courses and we are always here to help everybody. You so much, Ulysses.

Mr. Garrett:
No, thank you. Amazing work by everybody. This was very educational and informative to say the least. I would like to thank my guests, Anna, Jason, Steve, Deirdre, for your time and insightful information on this episode of ORA Speaks. And to those listening, I hope you're able to find this course resourceful and most importantly, take advantage of the courses itself and further, your retail regulatory food knowledge.

Until next time, my name is Ulysses Garrett, multimedia manager for ORA, and you have been listening to ORA Speaks podcast.