FIELD EXPERIENCE AT SALINE COUNTY HEALTH DEPARTMENT

Abstract

The Saline County Health Department is located in Salina, Kansas. The population of the county that the health department serves is 55,740 people and it is 78.5% Non-Hispanic White, 11.7% Hispanic, 3.5% Non-Hispanic Black, 3.1% Asian, 2.4% two or more races, and 0.6% American Indian. The health department offers vaccination, WIC (Women, Infants, and Children assitance program), maternal and child health, home health, and reproductive services. The median income of this area is $7,000 lower than that of the state of Kansas. Poverty level may be related to lower levels of food safety knowledge. A survey was utilized to investigate if there was a relationship between poverty level and food safety knowledge. The survey was designed from methods retrieved from other studies that evaluated food safety knowledge. The survey was distributed through social media to people in the community. The income level for the household and the number of people in the household was used to determine if respondents were above or below the federally defined poverty level. Of the 140 responses, 121 (86%) of the participants were above the poverty level and 19 (14%) were below the poverty level. For the education levels 116 (83%) of the people surveyed had some sort of education beyond high school, 23 (16%) had only a high school diploma, and 1 person had less than a high school diploma. The ethnicity of the participants was primarily Non-Hispanic white with 125 (89%) people; 5 (4%) were Non-Hispanic black, 7 (5%) were Hispanic and 3 (2%) were other ethnicities. The age brackets for the survey were 18-25, 25-50 and 50+. There were 9 (6%) people in the 18-25 range, 94 (67%) in the 25-50 range and 37 (26%) that were 50+. The participants were asked if they had prior food safety training; 96 (69%) indicated they did and 44 (31%) indicated they did not. The overall mean number of questions answered incorrectly for the 140 participants was 1.8. There were 11 food safety questions in the survey. Participants who were in the 18-25 range had a higher mean number of questions answered incorrectly than any of the other age groups at 2.4. This is consistent with the research that states that young adults have poor food safety knowledge. SAS (Statistical Analysis System) was used to interpret data by putting poverty level vs the number of questions the participant answered incorrectly in an ANOVA table. This showed that the people above the poverty level answered an average of 1.8 questions incorrectly whereas the people below answered an average of 2.2 questions incorrectly. There was not enough data to determine if there was a correlation between food safety knowledge and poverty level.