Food and Pool Safety InternAt — Orange County Health Care Agency (OCHCA)

Provide field and office support to Environmental Health Specialists (EHS), Assist management and supervisors with special projects and collection of supplemental information, accompany EHS in the field for data gathering and observations, prepare documents for stakeholders, and community outreach.

• EHS field observations and data collection
• Input of inspection data into the inspection database
• Assist EHS in data collection to register and permit charitable feeding sites to achieve food safety compliance
• Work on special projects, such as GIS mapping, creation of informational bulletins and flyers to the stakeholders, interpretation of laws into simplified documents to stakeholders
• Assist in health permit renewals of food and pool facilities and explaining the requirements of health permit and food safety regulations
• Participate in Interview workshop on how to interview for EHS job, search job positing, completion of specific science courses to EH career path.

Training:

• General employer orientation including but not limited safety trainings, code of conduct and workplace violence prevention training.
• Program trainings include the database training and specific policy and SOP trainings on Food and Pool Public Safety
• Weekly EHS one-on-one mentor training on data collection, customer contact, and field observations

Learning Outcomes:

• Gain practical understanding of how environmental health laws, regulations, and policies are applied to protect public health
• Develop field and inspection knowledge, gain exposure to facility inspections, permitting, compliance activities, charitable feeding operations and other EH programs
• Build professional and customer service skills, develop communication, teamwork, problem solving, organizations, and customer service skills through interactions with staff, businesses and the public.
• Explore the EH careers-understand the roles of environmental health professionals and become familiar with the career pathways including EH Tech and Registered Environmental health specialist positions including interview techniques.