Final report on ‘the identification of food safety priorities using the Delphi technique’

Abstract

One of EFSA’s key aims is to develop an EU risk assessment agenda - in collaboration with Member States - of “prioritised activities and initiatives which are likely to have the greatest impact in strengthening risk assessment and risk monitoring”. To support this, EFSA commissioned a Delphi survey of risk assessment experts throughout Europe. This report describes the design, conduct and results of this three-round survey. In the first round, named Round 0, 206 experts were sent a survey electronically, requiring them to identify three main topics that they thought should be a focus for EFSA (July 2015). Eighty-eight experts (42.7%) responded - coming from almost every European country. The topics they identified were clustered according to whether they were related to chemical risk assessment, microbiological risk assessment, environmental risk issues, or nutrition-related issues. Some topics were identified as relevant to more than one, or indeed all four, of these domains: the latter were clustered into a fifth list of ‘generic’ issues. The second survey, Round 1, comprised four different questionnaires - one for each risk domain, containing the specific topics related to that domain plus all of the topics from the generic list. These questionnaires required the experts to rate the importance of the identified topics on three criteria (‘knowledge’, ‘public health’ and ‘harmonisation’), and to explain their choice of the most important two. The questionnaires were piloted on members of EFSA’s Scientific Committee and amended to take into account their suggestions. The second survey was then sent to 500 experts (September, 2015), comprising those who had previously responded plus others identified with the help of EFSA, with roughly one-quarter receiving each questionnaire version. A total of 165 experts responded (33.0%), to which responses to the questionnaire from the Scientific Committee (making 173 in total) were added. From their responses, an ‘importance’ score was calculated from ratings of the three criteria and the 10 highest scoring topics in each domain were identified for use in four more risk-domain-specific questionnaires. These questionnaires also included feedback from experts in the form of statistics showing how the ten topics had previously been rated, plus written rationales given by experts (for their ‘top two’ topics). Experts were again required to rate the topics on the three criteria and this time choose one topic as most important for EFSA to consider. In the third round, Round 2, the 173 second-survey respondents were sent the questionnaire relevant to their expertise (October, 2015). A total of 137 responded (79.2%), comprising 41 ‘chemical’ experts (of 48; 85.4%); 24 ‘environmental’ experts (of 31; 77.4%); 34 ‘microbiological’ experts (of 45; 75.6%); 38 ‘nutrition’ experts (of 49; 77.6%). This report details the results from this third round. Analysis of results from these questionnaires shows movement towards consensus around some top-rated topics: this, along with the fact that there is overlap between risk-domains regarding several of the key topics of interest, results in a reduced list of 28 topics to be taken forward for further discussion with the experts.