Purpose: To identify the challenges of evaluating a vomit/diarrhea clean-up intervention targeting retail/foodservice food workers.
Methods: Best practices to plan the evaluation of a multistate vomit/diarrhea clean-up intervention were followed, starting with reviewing the literature, framing the evaluation in a theory of behavior change, developing a logic model, and conducting a power analysis for sample size estimation. The evaluation was then conducted using a quasi-experimental research design. Educators (n=34) from 20 states were enrolled then assigned to a treatment (delivered intervention as part of food safety training) or control group (delivered standard training). Pre- and postintervention surveys were administered to persons enrolled in training courses to collect data about knowledge, attitudes, and practices.
Results: Recruiting and retaining study educators was challenging. Challenges included time constraints (educators with eight-hour trainings expressed concern about including additional materials, cancelled trainings due to low enrollment, and survey administration issues (online survey could only be sent to those who had provided email addresses at sign-up and paper survey could only be administered to those who arrived early to training). It was important to engage educators in the study and frequently communicate with them to address concerns. Recruiting training subjects was also challenging. Initially, we intended to include only managers at commercial/retail foodservice establishments, however, because the eligibility rate was lower than anticipated, we relaxed our screening criteria to include institutional foodservice managers.
Significance: Our experiences can help food safety educators anticipate and avoid specific challenges when evaluating interventions targeting retail/foodservice workers.