ISO 45001:2018 – Occupational health and safety management systems – Requirements

Published in 2018, ISO 45001 has replaced one of the most popular British standard OHSAS 18001:2007. One of the major advantages of ISO 45001 is that it is based on the Annex SL framework thus making it ready for integration with other ISO management system standards such as ISO 9001, ISO 14001, etc.

ISO 45001 prescribes the criteria for an occupational health and safety management system (OHSMS) that an organization may want to build. Any type of an organization can refer to these criteria and develop its own occupational health and safety management system. Once all applicable criteria are addressed, the organization can get this occupational health and safety management system certified from a third party certification body.

Most organizations develop an occupational health and safety management system because –

  • There is a need to assure their customers that the organization controls the health and safety aspects of its employees, stakeholders, customers and suppliers in its workplace. A certification to ISO 45001 will provide that confidence to the organization’s customers.
  • The organizations need to develop a systematic approach to eliminate, reduce or prevent the workplace related hazards thereby meeting its social and legal obligations. An application of ISO 45001 offers a risk based framework to the organization where continual improvement process is established for controlling the occupational (workplace related) hazards and risks.

ISO 45001 helps the organizations build efficient operational controls in view of the hazards and risks to health and safety that arise due to its routine and non-routine activities. Such controls also satisfy the applicable statutory and regulatory requirements (e.g. Labour Laws) thereby ensuring the required compliance level.

Benefits

The benefits that an organization may get out of the application of ISO 45001 and its certification are mostly based on the management’s intentions of selecting this standard. However, following examples provide some direction about what the ISO 45001 can give the organizations in terms of its benefits 

“It is our practice to understand the benefits that our customers want by applying ISO 45001 and then design the system in a way to help the organization to realize these benefits”.

A ISO 45001 certified organization is considered to be more reliable than the other similar organizations that are not certified. The certification is globally accepted and is gained by large as well as small organizations hence bring an equality in terms its positioning of brand reliability per say. The certification adds up to the brand recognition.

There are many organizations who give preference to ISO 45001 certified suppliers. For example, if your organization operates in a developing country, then your opportunities for exporting your product/ service to customers from developed countries increase since these customers invariably demand such certification. Non-certified organizations lose out on such opportunities. The certification to ISO 45001 gives a competitive advantage.

Interested parties of an organization include its customers, owners, employees, suppliers, bankers, etc. All these have certain expectations in terms of the health and safety performance of the organization. Due to the enhanced workplace practices of the organization after application of ISO 45001 based occupational health and safety management system, the organization’s occupational health and safety (OH&S) performance becomes more and more visible. As a result the trust level and confidence of all these interested parties get a boost.

An organization that establishes health and safety related operational controls tend to save on costs related to occupational hazards and incidents.

Due to the rational thinking applied to the way the organizations react to the emergency situations such as fire, spillages, explosions, etc. that impacts the health and safety of this people in the workplace, the organizations builds effective plans and thus improves its ability to react and recover.

Applicability

The ISO 45001 standard applies to all types of organizations including commercial organizations, non-profit organizations, Governments, Educational Institutes, NGOs, etc.

Browse through the solutions for different industries based on our experience of some of the types of organizations that we have worked with in the past.

Roadmap to certification

ProcessLOGIX helps the customers from initiation of the occupational health and safety management system development till certification to ISO 45001.

Following 12-step process describes the high level approach to implementation and certification