Changes to the BS OHSAS 18001 Health & Safety Management System

1 Mar, 2018

The BS OHSAS 18001 Health and Safety Management System will shortly be replaced by the ISO 45001 Occupational Health and Safety Management System, with an expected publication date of 12^th March 2018.  Here are some frequently asked questions to help you understand what the change means for your business.

We are running BS OHSAS 18001, what does this mean for our business?
You will need to migrate to ISO 45001 within the next three years as the existing standard will become invalid, making businesses who do not comply uncertificated.

You may be tempted to put off the migration until a later date, however ISO 45001 will see significant improvements on BS OHSAS 18001 so why put it off? The new standard will be consistent with the high level structure of other standards such as ISO 9001:2015 Quality and ISO 14001:2015 Environmental, making migration easy from the existing management system.

What are the benefits of ISO 45001?
As with BS OHSAS 18001, the overall aim of ISO 45001 is to reduce risks and ensure the health and wellbeing of everyone involved within the business.

The top benefits to businesses who implement ISO 45001 will include:

• Enhanced reputation
• Reduced risk of potential litigation cases
• Improved productivity of the workforce as potential for absenteeism and sickness is reduced
• Reduced cost of insurance premiums
• Reduced overall costs of incidents
• Reduced downtime and costs of disruption to operations

Benefits to their customers include:

• Reassurance that products/services are delivered within legal requirements
• Heightened awareness of health and safety codes of practice in their supply chain

Benefits to their staff:

• Peace of mind that they are employed by a company that promotes health and safety in the workplace
• A culture of colleague led health and safety compliance with staff looking out for each other’s safety
• The ability to take responsibility for hazard identification and risk assessment

Improved job security through enhanced business performance

Does ISO 45001 protect me legally?
No, ISO 45001 is not a legally binding document, it is a voluntary management system for businesses whose aim is to eliminate or minimise the risk of harm.

Each management system should be specific to each business needs in preventing injuries and ill health.

How can ISO Quality Services help with the migration to ISO 45001?

• Our Existing Customers
  If you are already a client of ISO Quality Services for BS OHSAS 18001, we will help you through this migration process using your internal review visit. By using this visit as your upgrade assessment we are able to keep additional cost to a minimum.
• Companies with another provider including UKAS Accredited Certifications
  If you are not a client of ISO Quality Services Ltd and are certificated to the BS OHSAS 18001 with a different provider, we can still help you through this process using our simple, hands on and flexible approach.  We will initially perform a GAP analysis on your business to identify differences between the old and new standards.  Our experienced auditor will provide you with a full document of recommendations to help develop your policies and documents in line with the new standards.  If you wish for further consultancy we can arrange additional visits to guide you through the process of implementing the recommendations and can produce a mini manual to document the migration.

We don’t have BS OHSAS 18001 but are interested in ISO 45001, what can we do?
Any business of any size, in any given sector can be certificated to ISO 45001. If you are interested in implementing the new ISO 45001 standard, please contact a member of our team on 01905 670303 or info@isoqsltd.com.

If you are interested in any other standards or training that ISO Quality Services offer, please visit our website: www.isoqsltd.com or www.isotrainingservicesltd.com