Visitor Health Questionnaire Retention

Dear Forum

A control for anyone visiting our production and Storage areas is that they are required to complete a "Health Questionnaire" before entering, as i'm sure is the case for most businesses on this forum.

Currently this is in a hard copy / paper copy format, which is filed in by the visitor and then checked by the visitor's contact, and or the food safety team leader, on completion, the document is then filed in the Food Safety Team leaders office.

My question relates somewhat with the GDPR in mind, how long would you expect the completed questionnaire to be retained for - currently we have not stipulated such a time frame.

We state a shelf life for our product of up to 3 years, should the retention period of this document match that of our shelf life, or would, say 3 months be considered sufficient?

Any advise would be much appreciated.

David.

Hi David,
You can keep them as long as you need, as long as you have a legitimate purpose. How long do you keep other food safety records?

We make raw materials so our record retention includes a two-year allowance for the life of customer products, but in general we'd retain medical questionnaires for the same duration as other food safety / process records.

As these contain medical data the other key point to look at will be how secure the storage location is - we reviewed this in prep for GDPR and these have been relocated into a dedicated locked filing cabinet with very restricted access, rather than the locked cabinet in the technical office to which more people have a key.

HI pHruit

Current food safety records are typically 5 year retention, but i think you make a valid point about restriction of access, and so will look at it from this angle.

Many thanks