What are the Requirements of ISO 45001 Occupational Health and Safety Management System?

ISO 45001 is the international standard for occupational health and safety, delivered to guard employees and visitors from work-related accidents and sicknesses. ISO 45001 certification was established to mitigate any factors that can reason employees and businesses permanent harm. ISO 45001 standards are the result of great effort by a group of health and safety management experts who looked closely at a number of other methods 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.

Specially geared toward senior management, ISO 45001 has the ultimate goal of helping businesses deliver a healthy and safe working environment for their employees and everybody else who visits the workplace. This goal can be accomplished by controlling factors that could possibly lead to injury, illness and - in risky situations - even death. As a result, ISO 45001 is concerned with mitigating any factors that are injurious or that position a danger to workers’ physical and mental well-being.

Sadly, thousands of workers lose their lives each day to preventable occurrences of adverse workplace circumstances. In fact, according to the ISO and International Labour Organization ILO more than 2.7 million deaths happen globally due to occupational accidents, and in adding to that there are 374 million non-fatal injuries each year, resulting in 4 or more days absences from work.

According to many health and safety specialists including the professionals who worked on the ISO committee - ISO 45001 represents a landmark breakthrough. For the first time internationally, businesses of all sizes can now access a single framework that proposals them a clear pathway to developing well and more healthy occupational health and safety measures.

Requirements of ISO 45001 Occupational Health and Safety Management System:

• Context of the organization:

This section needs the organization to control its context in terms of the Occupational Health and Safety Management System, with interested parties and their requirements and expectations. It also defines requirements for determining the scope of the OH&SMS, as well as general OH&SMS requirements.

• Leadership:

This clause of the standard requires top management to prove leadership and commitment to the OH&SMS, along with defining the occupational health & safety policy. The top management must also allocate process owners with other roles and responsibilities.

• Planning:

The planning section describes requirements for addressing risks and opportunities, and the necessities for occupational risk analysis. This clause also contains requirements for hazard identification and assessment, determining legal and other requirements, OH&S objectives and plans for accomplishing.

• Support:

This clause defines requirements for supporting processes and provisions of resources essential for effective operation of the OH&SMS. It describes requirements for people, infrastructure, work environment, monitoring and measure resources, competence, awareness, communication and documented information.

• Operation:

This clause is focused on establishing operational controls to remove the occupational health and safety hazards, management of changes and emergency preparedness and response.

• Performance evaluation:

The purpose of the requirements placed in this clause is to deliver the organization with mechanisms to control the efficiency of the QMS. It covers requirements for essential monitoring and measuring, including performance evaluation, compliance obligation, internal audit and management review.

• Improvement:

The last section of the standard describes requirements for constant improvement of the OH&SMS, including requirements for managing nonconformities, incidents and corrective actions.

These sections are based on a Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle, which uses these fundamentals to implement change within the processes of the organization in order to drive and maintain developments within the processes. ISO 45001 documents to help in formatting quick documentation that compatible with ISO 45001 standard requirements. The ISO 45001 documents should cover manual, necessary policies, procedures, SOPs and audit checklist to control documents for organizations. Many organizations and ISO 45001 consultants are using ready documentation kits available to minimizes the time and cost involved in certification as well as better control over the implemented Occupational health and safety management system.

Ian Colin has published many articles regarding ISO Certification. Ian has rich experience as a online publisher and prepared various Certification documents as per ISO guideline since large amount of years in his professional career.