ISO 45001 Certification Requirements for Organizations

ISO 45001:2018 is the first international standard for occupational health and safety (OH&S) in the world. The ISO 45001 standard will inform you on this important matter when you require to ensure the health and safety of workers in the workplace. If you are implementing ISO 45001:2018 standard using an Occupational Health & Safety Management System (OHSMS) requirements, you are likely considering having OHSMS certified when ISO 45001 implementation is done.

To achieve ISO 45001:2018 Certification for OH&S Management System can be tricky, and the many specifications of the ISO 45001 standard could easily overwhelm you. Actually, ISO 45001 Certification is separate from its implementation. The implementation comes as a bit of a surprise to many people to find out that there is not a requirement in ISO 45001:2018 to have a third-party certification body conduct an audit and confirm that the organization has successfully implemented the requirements of the IS0 45001 standard.

There are so many reasons behind this implementation to have a third-party ISO 45001 auditor look at system, including the benefit of having someone outside your organization identifying ways to improve. Below is what the certification auditors will expect of OH&SMS before they perform their ISO 45001 audit.

For the ISO 45001 certification process, there are a few things that will require to be completed before the auditors come to perform their final certification audit. The ISO 45001 auditors will already have done their stage 1 documentation audit, where they have reviewed ISO 45001 documentation to ensure that to meet the ISO 45001 requirements of the standard.

After this, following are the steps to ensure for meeting ISO 45001 requirements:

Implemented all processes – you will need to ensure that all the processes that is require within the OHSMS are in place. It is expected that you have established each process, implemented each process and are maintaining each process. Incomplete processes are not acceptable.

OHSMS settled– In order to ISO 45001 audit, you should know about the sufficient records to demonstrate how your processes work. For this reason, ISO 45001 auditor training will help you to have used your OHSMS for a period of time to collect the records necessary to demonstrate.

All processes audited– One of the key processes to evaluate OHSMS performance is the ISO 45001 internal audit. The certification auditors will expect that the ISO 45001 internal audit review for all of your processes before they come and do their audits.

Completion of Management review–management review is another important OHSMS evaluation. You will have performed at least one management review of the OHSMS to verify effectiveness to assess resource allocation that is expectable.

Corrective actions– you will have found nonconformities in the processes during this time through internal audits, management reviews and process monitoring of ISO 45001. When these nonconformities are found, it is expected that you will have taken corrective actions to remove the nonconformity from happening again.

Demonstrated improvements – Corrective actions are one method of improvement, but you should also be able to demonstrate progress on OH&S objectives and use this in other ways of addressing opportunities for improvement in your OH&S processes.