Graduate Stories

Eugene Lee; Environmental Health Officer

During high school I was looking at various courses, as you do leading up to TEE time, and the environmental health pamphlet or job description seemed to be quite interesting.

You do a three-year course at Curtin University. They actually sent us out on professional practice, as they call it. I ended up going to Bayswater council for a while, a little while at the City of Perth and, for my country professional practice, they sent me to Bunbury.

I didn't realise that we had to do meat inspections, so that was one of the things that was kind of a shock to the system - actually going to the abattoirs and learning a bit about meat inspection and meat science.

Now, with the City of Perth, I'm looking at food hygiene, along with handling noise complaints. It's quite a diverse sort of profession.

On a day-to-day basis, we check what sort of calls we've had, whether we've had any complaints. But in general it's basically checking the majority of the food premises that are in my area.

If we get a noise complaint, we might have to do a noise measurement. If we get a food complaint, we'd go out and just investigate whether there's substance in it.

We try to inspect once every three months.

Most of them are doing their day-to-day functions quite well. But we see a fair few things that would be quite disturbing. The most interesting one was a sink plug in a muffin. The plug had fallen into the muffm mix while they were mixing the product near the sink. The chef noticed that the plug was missing but sort of never thought that it might be in the product.

Obviously, once you do the course it does affect you as to how you prepare your own food - but it hasn't put me off having meals out in restaurants at all.

We also do public building inspections after hours - like night clubs - checking on over-crowding, checking that exit signs are illuminated, exit doors aren't padlocked. So the profession has changed with time - it's not just food.

(as told to Angela Wellington)

Eugene Lee