Decision-making process regarding safety and crisis management for childcare workers: Focusing on food allergy management

When it comes to childcare, parents want to rest assured that, in their absence, their children are being provided with engaging activities, balanced nutrition and safety. Awareness of food allergies is key in childcare settings but most childcare workers don’t have medical backgrounds and therefore staff training on food allergies and related crises is imperative. Kayo Tamura is a former childcare worker and lecturer at Aichi Gakusen University in Japan who is developing guidelines for decision making processes for food allergy and crisis management for childcare workers. Guidelines were implemented by the Japanese Government following incidents involving allergies and school lunches in 1988 and 2012. However, Tamura is concerned that some teachers and childcare workers may be unable to implement these, meaning that accidents will continue to occur. Therefore, she is working with childcare providers to better understand how guidelines and training are received and implemented in childcare settings. In order to assess how much knowledge about food allergies and sense of crisis awareness students have developed by graduation, Tamara conducted a questionnaire survey of university students studying childcare. She also conducted a survey using the same questions, this time posed to childcare workers and performed a statistical analysis of the results. She found that many students already had some awareness of food allergies, often through personal experience but they acquired more specialist knowledge through university by reviewing government guidelines and manuals and through childcare training.