Media Release - 29 August 2019
Cumberland Council staff have been recognised at the Environmental Health Australia (NSW) Inc. Excellence Awards for outstanding work in their field.
As part of the accolades, Council’s Environmental Health Team was named Environmental Health Team of the Year.
"Cumberland Council has a team that is dedicated to providing a healthy and safe environment for residents and I am delighted that they have received formal recognition of their great work,” said Mayor Greg Cummings.
The team is responsible for a broad range of activities including inspecting food, industrial and public health premises, noise monitoring programs, monitoring the water quality of local creeks and public pools, managing food, environment and public health complaints and running education seminars.
In the past year, the team has conducted more than 1400 retail food inspections, 200 public health inspections and responded to more than 770 customer enquiries.
Their award nomination focussed on their targeted work with food safety education seminars. Many of these seminars included interpreters who assisted food handlers from non-English speaking backgrounds.
Council’s Team Leader of Environmental Health, Karen Boulter, was awarded the Environmental Health Professional, the fourth time in six years that a Cumberland Council staff member has received the award.
This award recognised Karen’s work in developing a risk assessment framework for council officers to use when inspecting cooling towers and detecting high levels of Legionella and other bacteria.
"In the past year, Karen and her team have undertaken a risk assessment of 150 cooling towers across the local government area,” said Mayor Cummings.
"Karen has developed a framework, which not only considers the public health risks posed by cooling systems and legionnaires’ disease, she has identified health and safety risks associated with working at heights and developed a framework that includes training with officers doing these inspections.
"This framework is now setting a benchmark for many councils in Sydney’s west."
