Health & Safety Management

Organizations devote considerable resources to protecting worker safety and ensuring healthy workplaces. For both business and financial reasons, many go beyond the minimum requirements set by occupational health and safety laws. Organizations with effective safety and health programs earn positive returns on their health and safety investment by

  • Reducing work-related accidents and ill-health and the costs associated with them
  • Improving performance through heightened employee morale and adherence to policies and procedures
  • Reinforcing a responsible and well managed reputation with customers, stakeholders, and communities.

A growing number of organizations operate health and safety programs in conjunction with their environmental management system. For such organizations, Futurepast recommends applying an ISO 14001-like approach to the review and improvement of a health and safety management system (H&SMS).

The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) brought ISO 45001 to market in 2018. This standard is intended as a replacement for OHSAS 18001, a British Standards Institution specification that will be withdrawn after the conclusion of a three‐year transition period ending in March 2021.  

Like OHSAS 18001, ISO 45001 emphasizes a proactive approach to health and safety management. The standard adopts ISO’s “high‐level structure” common management system elements, facilitating its integration with ISO 9001‐ based quality management systems and ISO 14001‐ based environmental management systems.

The goal of an ISO 45001‐based safety management system is to establish a culture of safety management and industrial hygiene within organizations of any type or size. A proactive approach to hazard identification and health and safety risk management empowers personnel to report situations that may constitute a threat to safe operations and to enable organizations to process information systematically, with the goal of preventing errors, accidents, and illnesses rather than reacting to them.

Futurepast assists organizations to upgrade their Safety Management Systems to meet the new ISO 45001 requirements or to help you design and implement a new management system that integrates seamlessly with your existing management systems.

Based on your requirements, Futurepast consultants will help you establish an SMS as a stand‐alone system or one that integrates with your other management system practices and procedures. We will also assist you with the upgrading and streamlining of existing management system practices and the selection and implementation of software solutions, if desired.

Futurepast consultants have years of management system experience. We have participated in management systems development, consulting and auditing since 1998. Please call us at 703-358-9127 or email us at count.carbon@futurepast.com for more information.