The Seventy-Cover Dinner and One Sick Food Handler
It is 4:45 pm on a Friday at a 70-seat bistro. The dinner service starts at 6:00 pm and the books are full. At 4:40 pm, a kitchen hand, Priya, tells the head chef she has had vomiting and diarrhoea since early morning and feels dizzy. She has been at work since 9:00 am and helped portion raw chicken for the evening specials before mentioning her symptoms. The head chef says, "Just wash your hands and stay on salads, we can't lose anyone tonight." The venue has no written food safety plan and no staff illness register. The sous chef is off sick and the only other kitchen staff are a first-year apprentice and a dishwasher. The owner is contactable by phone but is at a supplier meeting.
1. Identify the food safety breaches in this situation and explain the correct action the head chef should take regarding Priya, using the legal and hygiene reasoning behind it.
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The core breach is that a food handler with vomiting and diarrhoea has been allowed to keep handling food, including raw chicken. Under the Australia New Zealand Food Standards Code (Standard 3.2.2), a food handler who has symptoms of a foodborne illness, or knows they are a carrier, must not engage in any food handling activity that could make food unsafe, and must report the illness to the food business. Priya did report it; the head chef failed to act.
The head chef's "wash your hands and stay on salads" instruction is unsafe because:
- Hand washing reduces but does not eliminate risk when a person is actively shedding pathogens (norovirus, Salmonella, hepatitis A are all plausible).
- Salads are ready-to-eat and receive no kill step, so they are among the highest-risk foods for contamination.
- Priya already portioned raw chicken while symptomatic, so cross-contamination may already have occurred via hands, utensils, and surfaces.
The correct action is to exclude Priya from all food handling and food areas immediately, send her home, and advise her to see a doctor. She should not return until 48 hours after symptoms have resolved, and the business should seek medical clearance if a doctor suspects a notifiable condition. The head chef should also notify the owner, arrange replacement staff or reduce the menu, and treat the chicken Priya handled as potentially contaminated: discard it or, if it was already cooked, ensure it reached 75 degrees Celsius internally, and clean and sanitise all contact surfaces.
The absence of a food safety plan and illness register is a separate compliance gap. The business should document a staff illness policy, keep a register of reported symptoms and exclusions, and train all staff on their reporting duty.
2. The head chef decides to keep the full 70-cover service with only an apprentice and a dishwasher. Assess the operational risks and recommend a decision the chef should put to the owner.
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Keeping a full 70-cover service with an apprentice and a dishwasher creates several compounding risks:
- Supervision gap: a first-year apprentice cannot be assumed competent to run hot line, cold larder, and plating without direct supervision. Under WHS law the business must provide supervision and training proportionate to the worker's experience.
- Cross-contamination: with fewer hands, the same person may move between raw chicken and ready-to-eat salads without adequate hand-wash and board changes.
- Temperature control: a reduced team under time pressure is more likely to leave food in the temperature danger zone (5–60 degrees Celsius) during prep and plating.
- Fatigue and error: a 70-cover service with three people, one of whom is a dishwasher, is likely to produce delays, shortcuts, and mistakes.
The chef should phone the owner and present a clear recommendation: reduce the menu to a limited set of low-risk dishes, cap bookings or offer a reduced a la carte, and bring in a casual or agency cook if one can be contacted. If no qualified help is available, the safest option is to reduce covers or close the dining room and offer a limited takeaway menu. The decision should be recorded, and the owner should be told the reasoning so the business can show it acted reasonably. Protecting customers from illness and staff from injury outweighs the lost revenue from one service.