The ISO 45001:2018 standard for occupational health and safety supersedes the OHSAS 18001 standard, emphasizing the need for worker involvement in safety culture and robust training for hazard identification. It mandates legal compliance audits and updates the hazard identification and risk assessment process to include a hierarchy of control focused on elimination, substitution, engineering controls, and personal protective equipment. This shift aims to enhance the organizational safety processes and requires stakeholders to invest significantly in employee training and participation.

1. Occupational Health and Safety management
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3. § The new ISO 45001:2018 standard for Occupational health and safety is now an ISO
standard unlike previous version OHSAS 18001 standard. Its core text remains
similar to ISO 9001:2015 standard and other ISO standards having 10 clauses.
§ OH&S standard focuses that Leadership must involve workers for consultation and
participation to build safety culture.This implies everyone in an organization is a
worker and shall participate in promoting safety culture.
§ Each and every worker shall be competent enough to identify hazards. Standard
makes training element very robust for development of employees.Trainings must
exhibit addition of skill for identification of hazard. It implies now organizations
must invest in employees and online trainings are not sufficient as it has its own
limits. Many debate that online trainings are sufficient. If that’s the case then our
school/ university education system must have also moved to online mechanism.
But it has not because there is a difference between skill enhancement and
awareness.This standard beautifully focuses on same.

4. § Addition of “Evaluation of Compliance clause” indicates legal department audit is
mandatory now. As per companies act and factories act in India all legal compliances
are mandatory. Legal department audit is a mandatory to exhibit transparency in
implementation of laws in the organization.This is an additional clause apart from
legal and other requirement clauses.
§ Last but not the least the old word HIRA is now HIRA DC which implies not only
Hierarchy of Control but determination of control along with it is required. To
implement safety the first step is elimination then substitution followed by
engineering control (training). Then administrative control (signage’s/ maps etc) and
last is Personal Protective Equipment. So a worker wearing a safety helmet or jacket or
shoes -It’s the last step in hierarchy of control.This brings change in mindset of the
auditors who are auditing the system against this standard that they checking only PPE
are just not sufficient!
§ Be safe! Safety means having a safe process in place!