A FACTORY making meals for schools, patients and the elderly in Wiltshire, which was criticised by a TV documentary, has been given a clean bill of health by county experts after a surprise visit there.

An expos on Tillery Valley Foods' factory in Wales, by Channel 4's Dispatches, showed workers coughing and sneezing while preparing food and dipping their ungloved fingers into vats of cooked food.

Tillery Valley Foods supplies meals to Sodexho which delivers them to schools in Wiltshire, community hospitals such as Malmesbury and Devizes, and Meals on Wheels for Social Services users. It will also be providing meals to the redeveloped Savernake Hospital in Marlborough which opens later this year.

Wiltshire County Council officers made an unannounced and reported that, apart from one concern, food hygiene was being dealt with in a satisfactory manner.

The county council officers Andrew Manning and Lyn Rogers visited the factory's butchery department, the

microbiology laboratory and production facility.

The officers checked the audit trail for the food production temperatures and the systems in place to trace the food throughout the production cycle.

They said that supervision levels in both the low and high risk areas were good and there was a robust recording system to track the progress of the food from delivery to the factory, storage and issue to the production area through to distribution.

The officers said there was a good awareness among the staff and management of the need for stringent hygiene procedures.

The only area of concern raised by the officers was that blue plasters worn by workers to cover cuts may not be detected by a metal detector should they fall off.

This issue was taken up with Tillery Valley Foods.

Technical and quality assurance director Jim Statts said the company does not rely on metal detection to identify potentially lost plasters but has robust procedures in place.

In a letter to the county council he said plasters applied to fingers and hands are further covered by either a blue glove or blue fingerstall and the plasters are blue to allow for visual detection.

He added: "In our 20 year trading history we have never lost a plaster in our food.

"From our risk analysis we have established that the procedures being employed more than adequately control the use of plasters."

The unannounced visit was ordered by the county council's overview and scrutiny management committee when, at a meeting in June, it discussed the implications of the Dispatches programme.

The report of the visit, made on October 27, will be discussed by the committee at its meeting tomorrow.

The factory is also visited every six months and inspected by a company on behalf of the National Health Service.

The Kennet and North Wiltshire Primary Care Trust said it had enjoyed a trouble free service with Tillery Valley Foods which had supplied Devizes and Malmesbury hospitals for more than ten years.