what is an ISO 45001 HEALTH & SAFETY MANAGEMENT SYSTEM?

ISO 45001 is an Occupational Health and Safety Management System (OHSMS) which provides a system for measuring and improving an organisation’s health and safety impact.

ISO 45001 focuses on managing your organisation's internal environment to ensure a safe and healthy workplace. ISO 45001 certification was developed to mitigate any factors that can cause employees and businesses irreparable harm. 

Its requirements are the result of great effort by a committee of health and safety management experts who looked closely at a number of other approaches to system management - including ISO 9001 and ISO 14001. 

In addition, ISO 45001 was designed to take other existing occupational health and safety standards, such as OHSAS 18001, into account - as well as the ILO’s labor standards, conventions and safety guidelines.

​The major benefits to companies who hold ISO 45001 certification are: 

• Creates a more efficient, effective operation.
• Creates an organisation built around H&S best practice.
• Reduces third party audits.
• Reduces risk of accidents and incidents.
• Improves employee motivation, awareness, and morale.
• Lowers insurance premiums.
• Improves managerial oversight for H&S.
• Deals with H&S risks and opportunities for improvement.

The true value of ISO 45001 comes from linking the business strategy and the health and safety management system - not developing a standalone set of documents.

Using ISO 45001 to help manage risks and contractors, core and support processes, equipment and people gives you the opportunity not only to control but to assess and improve the health and safety of workers and others. 

Certification to ISO 45001 gives you the opportunity to identify improvements and further reduce the risk of injury, illness and death.

The sort of things that you'll need to consider - which we can help you with - would be:
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• Define the OHSMS and its scope within the organisation
• Develop procedures for the on-going identification of hazards, assessments of risks and determination of the necessary controls
• Develop OH&S programme with objectives & targets
• Defines relevant management, accountability, structure, roles, responsibilities, authorities and OH&S management representative
• Ensure that persons performing tasks are competent and trained to do them
• Outline required procedures for internal & external communications
• Control documents so that current versions are distributed and available at points of use and obsolete versions are removed from the system
• Identify critical functions associated with the identified hazards where controls are necessary
• Process required for identifying & responding to emergencies
• Develop plans to monitor and measure OH&S performance on a regular basis
• Develop procedures for scheduled evaluations of compliance, investigating incidents and acting on health and safety non-conformances, and conducting the audits at planned intervals

If you would like to look at how to implement an ISO 45001 health & safety management system, then simply contact us.
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Or, if you want to see what's involved in more detail, then get a completely free, no obligation, totally tailored ISO Gap Analysis for your business (only available to UK businesses).