Case Study: Vancouver Coastal Health Authority

The Vancouver Coastal Health Authority's (VCHA) environmental health programs are designed to protect public health by minimizing environmental health risks to the population through inspections and interventions.

Over the last eight years, VCHA's food safety program experienced a 25 percent increase in the number of facilities requiring inspection but has not augmented its staff. Each of the 45 public health inspectors perform approximately 50 site inspections per week and had to find ways of working more efficiently, using existing resources.

Until recently, the VCHA worked with three-year-old notebook computers which inspectors found bulky and not conducive for site inspections. Using these older notebooks, data entry required ten to 15 minutes of in field work in addition to 30 to 60 minutes inspection as well as another ten minutes in the office re-entering the data they had collected into the standardized forms.