Are you looking for an accredited Health and Safety management standard for your business? Look no further – in this week’s Take 5 video, we’re discussing ISO 45001 and how this can help show your customers and employees that you are serious about health and safety. It can also make administering health and safety just that little bit easier – read on or watch our video to find out more…
What is ISO 45001?
In simple terms, ISO 45001 is an internationally recognised standard for health and safety at work which was introduced in 2018. While businesses are not obligated to implement this management system, it offers a trusted and reliable framework to ensure the latest health and safety standards are being met. It can help you to plan, check and act on any issues.
Key Features of ISO 45001
There are seven key features of the ISO 45001 which all feed into one another for a well-rounded approach to health and safety.
- Organisational context: This requires you to consider the Internal and external factors that may affect the types of health and safety measures you need to consider for your workplace.
- Leadership: This involves writing up a clear statement of your goals and intentions. You will need to set commitments that are supported by the leaders within the company or organisation.
- Planning: The planning stage involves thinking about the hazards and risks in your business and drawing up risk assessments accordingly. It’s a great idea to consider a proactive approach with an aim to eliminate hazards as well as manage them. It’s also important to establish who’s responsible for what within your business.
- Support: Feeding in to the previous point, good communication channels and consistency are key when successfully implementing health and safety in the workplace. You should also make sure you allocate sufficient resources, including time, money and human resources.
- Operation: It’s important to plan for changes, control hazards and risks, and have a standard procedure to deal with emergencies.
- Performance evaluation: This involves writing up proactive inspections and audits as well as monitoring and reacting to any accidents, near misses or complaints. Essentially, performance evaluation helps you to take action when things are going wrong and try and prevent other problems from arising or escalating.
- Improvement: This is your chance to reflect on the performance evaluation and decide what’s working well and what you could improve on.
So, there’s your introduction to the ISO 45001 standard – we hope you enjoyed it! It’s up to you whether you want to use this system, but we recommend it for being a simple way to control, manage and review your health and safety measures in the workplace.
At Cambridge Safety, our new bitesize videos are perfect for those studying Nebosh qualifications, professionals responsible for health and safety in the workplace, or anyone who just wants a quick recap or short introduction to the subject. We’ll be releasing a new video every month, so look out for our next clip.
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