Moldy and rotting food, dirty floors, unwashed hands and undercooked food are among the 38 critical violations found by Tri-County Health inspectors in the past year inside the Children’s Hospital cafeteria.
While most hospital kitchens are inspected twice a year, inspectors returned to Children’s cafeteria 15 times in the past 14 months because it repeatedly failed inspections.
“What we’re finding is a pattern has persisted,” said Dr. Richard Vogt, Tri-County Health Department executive director.
The Children’s Hospital cafeteria, which never closes, serves more than 2,000 meals a day to patients and their families.
“It is not uncommon for any food-service operation of this scope and magnitude to incur violations,” said Children’s spokeswoman Natalie Goldstein.
Given the poor inspection reports, however, Vogt worries that patients may be exposed to foodborne illnesses.
“We have patients at Children’s Hospital that have immuno-compromising illnesses, and under those circumstances they need a very clean food source in order to get well,” he said.
Dr. James Todd, Children’s director of epidemiology, said the Aurora hospital has never had a patient become ill as the result of eating in the cafeteria.
“We continuously monitor for any infections among our patients, and there has never been a causative link between any food-service-related violation and our children’s health,” Todd said.
Inspection reports show the hospital corrected all of its critical-violation problems in five follow-up inspections.
A review of health inspection records at the previous Children’s facility in Denver shows a similar pattern of critical violations. There, Denver health department inspectors found 16 critical violations between August 2005 and August 2007.
When compared with three other hospitals in the Tri-County area, Children’s Hospital has more than twice the number of violations and visits as the other hospitals.
