What is an Occupational Health & Safety Management System (OH&SMS)?
- It defines the framework in which the organization cares for the occupational health and safety of its employees.
- It represents a set of rules, policies, processes, plans and practices for preventing occupational health and safety hazards and minimizes risks in the workplace.
- It is unique for every organization and it must be adequate to the legal requirements, occupational health and safety hazards and business processes applied in the organization.
Which ISO delivers the promise of OH&SMS?
ISO 45001 represents the best practices in establishing, implementing and maintaining the OH&SMS.
What are the benefits of ISO 45001?
- Mitigating occupational health and safety hazards and preventing injuries in the workplace
- Improve your image and credibility.enhancement of company’s public image that comes with being ISO 45001 certified,
- Engage your people.demonstration that your company belongs among those businesses that cares for its employees’ health and safety.
- Promise of better relationships with others. customers, the public, and the community,
- Improve cost control.Save money by the company through reducing incidents resulting in injuries and being able to obtain insurance at a more reasonable cost
- Use evidence-based decision making.By ensuring that you are using accurate data to make your decisions on what to improve, you can greatly increase the chances that your improvements will be successful the first time, rather than having several unsuccessful attempts. By using this data to track your progress, you can correct these improvement initiatives before they go “off the rails,” which can save costs and time.
- Create a culture of continual improvement.With continual improvement, you can work toward better processes and reduced occupational health and safety hazards in a systematic way, in order to improve your public image and potentially reduce your costs.
How is the structure of ISO 45001?
The ISO 45001 consist of eleven sections. The first three sections represent an introduction to the standard, its scope and normative references, and the other seven sections contain the requirements for the Occupational Health and Safety Management System. Here is what the seven main sections are about:
Section 4: Context of the organization. This section requires the organization to determine its context in terms of the Occupational Health and Safety Management System, including interested parties and their needs and expectations. It also defines requirements for determining the scope of the OH&SMS, as well as general OH&SMS requirements.
Section 5: Leadership. This clause of the standard requires top management to demonstrate leadership and commitment to the OH&SMS, along with defining the occupational health & safety policy. The top management must also assign process owners with other roles and responsibilities.
Section 6: Planning. The planning section defines requirements for addressing risks and opportunities, and the requirements for occupational risk analysis. This clause also includes requirements for hazard identification and assessment, determining legal and other requirements, OH&S objectives and plans for achieving them.
Section 7: Support. This clause defines requirements for supporting processes and provisions of resources necessary for effective operation of the OH&SMS. It defines requirements for people, infrastructure, work environment, monitoring and measuring resources, competence, awareness, communication and documented information.
Section 8: Operation. This clause is focused on establishing operational controls to eliminate the occupational health and safety hazards, management of changes and emergency preparedness and response.
Section 9: Performance evaluation. The purpose of the requirements placed in this clause is to provide the organization with mechanisms to determine the effectiveness of the QMS. It contains requirements for necessary monitoring and measuring, including performance evaluation, compliance obligation, internal audit and management review.
Section 10: Improvement. The last section of the standard defines requirements for continual 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 elements to implement change within the processes of the organization in order to drive and maintain improvements within the processes.
