Food safety lecturers who attended the workshop are expected to apply the internationally standardised curriculum at their universities. VNS Photos Khánh Dương

NHA TRANG — About 70 university lecturers across the country have attended a workshop on international standard food safety training courses this week in the south-central coastal city of Nha Trang.

The training, which is taking place from Friday until Sunday, is designed to equip lecturers in Việt Nam with the skills and knowledge to deliver courses in an undergraduate food safety curriculum and a graduate food certificate programme following international standards.

This is part of the Safe Food for Growth Project (SAFEGRO) funded by Global Affairs Canada and implemented by the Vietnamese Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, Ministry of Health, Ministry of Industry and Trade and relevant agencies.

Đỗ Thành Lâm, SAFEGRO project director, said enhancing the quality of training and workforce development in food safety plays a particularly important role in the construction and implementation of food safety regulations and policies based on scientific evidence and risk assessment.

One of SAFEGRO’s focuses is to support the improvement of food safety training through the development of modern teaching materials approaching international standards for university and short-term training courses at businesses and food safety management agencies, he said.

With the participation of leading national and international experts, the SAFEGRO Project has developed teaching materials for 10 specialised modules on food safety, focusing on important areas such as risk analysis, food inspection, testing and traceability, food factory hygiene design, food safety management systems, quality assurance and food safety culture.

“This set of materials not only helps update the latest scientific knowledge but is also highly practical, supports lecturers in teaching and improves the capacity of professional staff,” he said.

The workshop aims to build lecturers' capacity in food safety education.

Professor Lawrence Goodridge, director of Canadian Research Institute for Food Safety at the University of Guelph and one of the workshop’s trainers, said Canada does not have a national curriculum for food safety on which everybody agrees. He praised SAFEGRO’s efforts in developing a food safety curriculum which he calls “a modern way of an input to the future of how food safety education should be done”.

He noted that one of the workshop’s major objectives is to ensure that the course material aligns with international food safety standards.

“These standards are always changing. There will be needs to update the course material from time to time to develop interactive and engaging teaching methodologies,” he said.

Over the three-day course, participants are expected to share their practical teaching experience and propose solutions to improve teaching effectiveness and improve lecture content to suit the actual conditions of Việt Nam.

On the last day of the workshop, lecturers are expected to come up with a specific action plan to apply these modules at their universities this year. — VNS