Tattoo parlours and other personal-service businesses in Ottawa could soon be facing tighter guidelines aimed at preventing the spread of infectious diseases such as Hepatitis B and HIV.
The Ottawa Board of Health has approved a plan to explore new strategies to improve infection control among businesses with unavoidable person-to-person contact.
A motion from board member Tim Hutchinson, the director of the Public Health Agency of Canada, proposes a city-wide assessment of the personal-services sector that could lead to more stringent regulation within the next year.
The proposal calls for the board to educate both the general public and the operators of personal services on how to best prevent the spread of infectious diseases while also improving the efforts in the surveillance of those businesses by public health inspectors.
Dr. Carolyn Pim, an Ottawa Public Health physician in charge of community health protection, says the issue of infection prevention and control has become more of a priority in the past couple of years.
“We have something called the Ontario Public Health standards which require us to do inspections of personal-service settings, and this is fairly new,” she says.
She added that as OPH gets more involved in the issue, it’s looking to develop a more comprehensive approach.
A key challenge is the high number of personal-service businesses that pop up without being noticed.
“We don’t really know where all of these facilities are,” she says. “There’s no mechanism for us to be informed when a new one pops up.”
Pim also says that OPH relies heavily on public health inspectors to discover new shops that might need inspecting both while travelling around the city and through Internet searches since there’s no licensing process for personal-service businesses.
Greg Boulanger, a tattoo artist at the Ink Spot on Bank Street, says mandatory licensing for tattoo parlours and related businesses would go a long way to stopping the spread of disease and preserve reputations of legitimate sites.
“Everything that they (OPH) tell us to do, we’re right on the ball,” says Boulanger, pointing to people advertising their services on the Kijiji and Craigslist websites as the potential rogues within the industry.
“Some people have shops open that shouldn’t be tattooing,” he says, noting that those kinds of operations are unable to maintain the high standards of sanitation necessary.
Pim says the OPH is exploring a licensing system based on systems in cities such as Toronto and Montreal.
She added that regulating these businesses would benefit the owners because it would allow the city to help educate managers and employees on the best ways to prevent the spread of infectious diseases.
The motion calls for a full report on improving strategies for infection prevention and is to be presented before the end of the year.