The transitioning process from ISO/IEC 27001:2013 to ISO/IEC 2....
ISO 45001 Transition
Health, Safety and Environment
2016-06-02
Introduction
Every organization is responsible to ensure safety in a workplace for its workers, as well as to minimize the risk of harm to the people that might be affected by the activities of the organization. An organization that does not regularly check on its setting can lead to serious accidents that result in illnesses, injuries, damages or loss of lives. According to the International Labor Organization statistics, every day 6,300 people die as a result of occupational accidents or work-related diseases - more than 2.3 million deaths per year, while 317 million accidents occur on the job annually.
"Every 15 seconds, a worker dies from a work-related accident or disease, and 153 workers have a work-related accident".
Regarding the issues stated above, there was an enormous demand for a standard which underscores the importance of programs to protect the employees’ health and safety. Currently, the standard addressing the problems related to the workplace safety is OHSAS 18001. It helps organizations to implement a framework and guidelines for the control and identification of risk, accidents, and the organizations’ overall OH&S performance. It helps companies to control and/or mitigate risk issues and problems that may arise. At present, there are about 90,000 companies with OH&S certification, in more than 127 countries.
"It is estimated that over 40 million new jobs per year need to be created by 2030 due to the growth of the global working age population".
Even though the current standard has been widely used since it was published, and has played a key role to improve occupational health and safety regulations and requirements across the world, the ISO has initiated the development of ISO 45001 to ease the alignment with other ISO Management Systems. As a result of this, ISO project committee has been working on the ISO 45001 Standard which is going to replace OHSAS 18001.
"In UK during the years 2014-15, around 27.3 million working days were lost due to workplace injury and work-related illness".
"It is estimated that the loss of world’s GDP due to accidents and diseases is 4% (2.8 trillion $)".
What are the main changes of the ISO 45001 comparing with OHSAS 18001?
Compared with OHSAS 18001, the ISO 45001 has got some fundamental changes. The new standard will follow the same structure as other recently published standards (ISO 9001:2015 and ISO 14001:2015), and one of the main reasons of following a similar structure is to have an easier implementation of an integrated management system.
The ISO 45001 incorporates Annex SL Framework which improves the compatibility between all of the management standards. However, all new ISO management systems will follow this framework, as well as all the existing management systems are expected to migrate to this framework at their next revision. In the future, it is estimated that Annex SL will represent 30-40 % of ISO system standards. Many organizations are certified and have implemented more than one management system. Therefore, as implementing standards individually requires extra time and resources, integrating and combining the standards will ease the implementation by also being time and cost-effective.
The new standard includes 10 clauses and these clauses are listed as below:
- 1.0 Scope
- 2.0 Normative References
- 3.0 Terms and Definition
- 4.0 Context of the Organization
- 5.0 Leadership
- 6.0 Planning
- 7.0 Support
- 8.0 Operation
- 9.0 Performance evaluation
- 10.0 Improvement
Context of the organization – the general requirements (clause 4.1) material of the OHSAS 18001 is also incorporated into the ISO 45001, but the changes that are made are put into two new sub-clauses: “Understanding the organization and its context” and “Understanding the needs and expectation of interested parties”. In compliance with this requirement, the organization should understand the occupational health and safety challenges of the organization, and risk inherent in that market segment. Also, the organization should determine the internal and external environment to determine the issues that are relevant, and can prevent the success of the OHSMS implementation. Furthermore, the new standard requires from the organization to determine and analyze its interested parties including: financial institutions, suppliers, customers, media, public, and so on.
Leadership – the requirements like the Policy, Organizational Roles, Responsibilities, Accountabilities and Authorities are transferred from the OHSAS 18001. The ISO 45001 has added an important new requirement which states that the top management has to demonstrate their leadership and commitment by taking accountability and effectiveness of the OH&S. This requirement is named as “leadership and worker participation”, and according to the standard “workers include top management, managerial and non-managerial persons”. Furthermore, the new standard has also emphasized the significance of the leadership’s role, meaning that everyone must be included within the decision making process, not only the senior leaders, but all levels of the organization.
Planning – this clause requires from organizations to consider the risks and opportunities associated to the issues that are identified in 4.1, more specifically with regards to the interested parties. This clause has brought a significant change to the standard, by replacing preventive action and reducing the need for corrective actions. Additionally, the requirements on risks and hazards have been extended, by focusing also on risks and opportunities related to relevant interested parties of the organization. Some of the requirements of this clause can be implemented at the planning phase, by understanding what, who, how, and when the risks must be addressed.
Support – the requirements of this clause take into consideration the areas of Resources, Competence, Awareness, Communication and Documented Information. The main change of this requirement is the term “documents and records” which has been replaced with “documented information”.
Operations – the requirements of this clause have not changed significantly, they are just more specific and explicit compared with OHSAS 18001. These clauses include the requirements on Operational Planning and Control, Management of Change, Outsourcing, Procurement, Contractors and Emergency Preparedness and Response.
Performance Evaluation – this clause takes into consideration the requirements on Monitoring, Analysis and Evaluation, Evaluation of Compliance, Internal Audit and Management Review. There are no significant changes on ISO 45001 regarding these clauses compared to OHSAS 18001. To comply with requirements of this clause it is required by the organization to determine what, how and when different issues need to be monitored, measured, analyzed and evaluated in the organization. Similar to OHSAS 18001, internal audit is also included as a requirement on ISO 45001 to ensure that the management system conforms to the requirements of the standard, statutory and regulatory requirements, industry requirements, and requirements coming from interested parties.
ISO 45001 and other standards
High level structure approach of the ISO 45001 enables this standard to be easy integrated to other ISO management system standards including ISO 9001 (Quality) and ISO 14001 (Environment). During the development of the standard, attention has been given to the content of other international standards (including OHSAS 18001 or the International Labour Organization “ILO-OSH Guidelines”) and other national standards, as well as to the ILO’s International Labour standards and conventions (ILSs).
Those organizations that would adopt the standard after its publication should find its requirements consistent with other standards. This will allow the organizations to relatively easy migrate from using the existing OH&S management system standard to using ISO 45001. Furthermore, it will also allow the organizations to be aligned and integrated with the requirements of other ISO management system standards.
Finally, the ISO 45001 standard does not state specific criteria for the OH&S performance, even if it is prescriptive about the design of an OH&S management system. The standard does not specifically address issues such as product safety, property damage or environmental impact.
The importance of being ISO 45001 certified
ISO 45001 is an International Standard which specifies the requirements for an OH&S management system, with guidance for its use that enables organizations to proactively improve its occupational health and safety performance in avoiding injury and ill-health. ISO 45001 will be applicable to any organization regardless of its size, type and nature. Additionally, the standard enables organizations to integrate other aspects of health and safety such as worker’s wellness or wellbeing.
Main benefits of using ISO 45001:
- Developing and implementing an OH&S policy and OH&S objectives;
- Determining the hazards and OH&S risk associated with its activities;
- Establishing processes that consider its “context” and which take into consideration its risk and opportunities, its legal and other requirements;
- Establishing operational controls to manage its OH&S risks, legal and other requirements;
- Increasing awareness of OH&S risks;
- Evaluating OH&S performance and seeking to improve it by taking appropriate actions;
- Ensuring workers take an active role in OH&S matters.
Other benefits of the standard are:
Improving its ability to respond to regulatory issues
Reducing the overall costs of incidents
Reducing downtime and the costs of distribution to operations
Reducing the cost of insurance premiums
Recognition for having achieved an international benchmark
The ISO 45001 is currently under development and is estimated to be published by the end of 2016 or at the latest, in early 2017. The transition period from OHSAS 18001 to ISO 45001 is likely to last 2-3 years. For the existing users, it is important to get a draft of the standard, have a detailed look, and plan a transition process towards ISO 45001. For the companies that are not using any of the two standards, an effective starting point is to use ISO 45001 draft as a guide to what is coming in 2016 or 2017.
For more information please visit ISO 45001 Transition Course.
Principle Author:
Nysret Lezi, PECB
Contributors:
Suzana Ajeti, PECB
Lorika Bina, PECB
