ISO 45001 Occupational Health and Safety

“It is a fundamental right for every worker to be able to return home at the end of the day alive and healthy. Yet every 15 seconds, 160 workers have a work-related accident, one of them fatal.”

Source: International Labour Organization, 2013

OHSAS 18001 Health and Safety Management provides the operational level capabilities to manage workplace health and safety. It pertains to practically all industries including Aerospace and Defense, Automotive, Consumer Packaged Goods, General Manufacturing, Hi-Tech, and Life Sciences. Besides the toll on employees and their families, a company’s financial impact for incidents can include lost time, lost productivity, delay in delivery of goods and services, exposure to litigation, fines, citations, and remediation. While the quality management of products or services and environmental protection protect physical phenomena, safety and health management in the workplace involves protecting people and developing a safety culture between employers and employees.

Introducing ISO 45001, a new workplace safety standard that replaced OHSAS 18001 at the end of 2017. To comply with international needs and requirements, more than 50 countries and organizations have been involved in the creation of ISO 45001. The aim is to provide a tool that can be used by any organization, in any industry, anywhere in the world. The new international standard is designed to allow organizations to tailor occupational health and safety management systems to their workplace more effectively. The requirements for ISO 45001 are process-oriented instead of focused on ensuring that a specific procedure is adopted. This will allow organizations to develop an occupational health and safety management program that addresses the specific risks of their workplace. The new standard uses ISO 9001:2015 and ISO 14001:2015 as its references. This means the requirements of this standard is harmonized with the requirements of the other two standards making integration into an existing management system far easier due to the common framework.

Since January 1, 2017 companies now must follow a modified regulation (OSHA 29 CFR Part 1904) for recording incidents and electronically reporting occupational injuries and illnesses to OSHA. OSHA’s recordkeeping regulation currently covers more than 600,000 employers with approximately 1,300,000 establishments. This final rule will also allow OSHA to more effectively target its enforcement resources to establishments with high rates or numbers of workplaces injuries and illnesses, and better evaluate its interventions.

ComplianceQuest – Product, Quality and Safety Management Software is an integrated cloud-based solution that provides the capabilities to meet OHSAS 18001 or ISO 45001 for health and safety and will help companies automate their OSHA incident recording and electronic reporting anywhere, anytime for anyone. CQ significantly reduces the effort involved in maintaining your health and safety system by eliminating manual efforts, scattered hard copy storage and by making the required processes automated while maintaining full traceability. Fully integrated with solutions for quality and environmental incident management, CQ provides you with one platform for your needs. Natively built and run on Salesforce, CQ was designed from the ground-up to provide reliability, versatility, and scalability for all size companies with worry-free infrastructure and maintenance.